In this essay I argue that it is the way institutions evolve that shapes long run economic performance. By institutions I mean formal rules--political and economic-- and informal constraints--such as conventions and norms of behavior as well as the characteristics of enforcement of both. To be...

The argument of this essay is that productivity increases result from both improvements in human organization and from technological developments. Indeed it is probably true that the former is as important as the latter in economic growth. In the following sections I first lay out the...

In this essay I propose to explore what we can and cannot learn about the way economies evolve over time. The focus of the essay is on the dynamics of change--political, social, and of course economic; and therefore the key word is time. In section I I outline the process of economic change as I...

In an earlier essay (North, 1981, Ch. 3) I developed a "Neo-Classical Theory of the State". This essay elaborates, extends and modifies that essay in three directions: 1. it incorporates time into the model; 2. it is explicitly concerned with the perceptions--the belief systems--that determine...

In this essay I would like to apply the new institutional economics to suggest modifications of the theory we employ in economics to make that theory useful for the study of the performance of economies through time. The modifications I shall suggest are in the spirit of Joseph Schumpeter

A theory of institutional change is essential for further progress in the social sciences in general and economics in particular. Essential because neo-classical theory (and other theories in the social scientist's toolbag) at present cannot satisfactorily account for the very diverse...

Improving our undertanding of the nature of economic change entails that we draw on the only laboratory that we have--the past. But "understanding" the past entails imposing order on the myriad facts that have survived to explain what has happened--that is theory. To begin we need to assess what...

This paper presents and discusses the five propositions about institutional change, and then proposes a specific research agenda based on a transaction cost theory of political markets.

The neo-classical approach to analyzing the performance of an economy assumes that in the face of pervasive scarcity individuals make choices reflecting a set of desires, wants or preferences. But valuable as this model has been for the development of an elegant body of theory it is a very...

In this essay I would like to confront a number of fundamental puzzles in economic history/development--puzzles that go to the heart of the nature of economic change. They can be broadly classified under two general headings: how to account for the uneven and erratic pattern of both historical...