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...

In recent years, there have been major advances in the empirical analysis of the link between institutions and development. However, a number of methodological problems – both theoretical and empirical – remain unresolved and have been well articulated by Ha-Joon Chang in his article...