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...

Ha-Joon Chang, in his article ‘Institutions and Economic Development: Theory, Policy and History’, argues that the institutions and development literature is theoretically and empirically flawed, trapped by a failure to account for the contextual factors that influence the institutions that...