This article is a reply to the comments made on my target article, ‘Institutions and Economic Development: Theory, Policy and History’, at the beginning of this issue.

The article tries to advance our understanding of institutional economics by critically examining the currently dominant discourse on institutions and economic development. First, I argue that the discourse suffers from a number of theoretical problems – its neglect of the causality running...

This article draws on several of the major breakthroughs in the institutions and development field to demonstrate that criticisms of work in this field as a whole based on its allegedly universal and unquestioning support for liberalizing institutions and the simplistic rationale and deficient...