অবিস্মৃত স্মৃতি(হার্ডকভার) পিডিএফ ডাউনলোড করুন

gdonalddak

A good study of the role of informal institutions in economic growth, but a fundamental lack of attention/neglect to the nature of institutional change. The author argues that the fundamental process of economic development is the transformation of informal to formal institutions. The author attributes underdevelopment in the 3rd world to the inability of those people to leverage their assets to create capital (they thus have only "dead capital"). Many people in developing countries live on land that is not technically (i.e. formally) their own. The government creates many barriers to the legitimization of their capital. The author cites the US as the prime example of how a government can legitimate squatter rights (essentially citing the homestead act of the 1860s). This allows the settlers to trade their land rights with a set of people beyond their own families/friends. Interestingly, the author argues that the settlers had already established themselves on the land well before the homestead act. The political leaders of the time eventually stopped trying to evict the settlers, realizing they were an important political base (as they were the majority of the population). While the story of the US does provide an important example of why the transformation/incorporation of informal into formal property rights plays a fundamental role in development, it's relevance for the third world today is less clear. In the US, there were substantially fewer established political bases that needed to be overcome to establish new property law. Over the past 200 years, the developing world has faced the imposing laws of metropoles interested in extracting natural resources and exploiting cheap labor, as opposed to efficient, democratic property law. The Native Americans proved to be less of a political opposition than the extractive metropoles of England, France, Spain, and the Netherlands. Reinforcing the author's blindness towards the causes of institutional change, the author makes snide jokes at those who argue that economic underdevelopment is the result of colonial legacies (See Acemoglu, et. al, The Colonial Origins of Economic Development, AER 2001 for a lambasting of this author's views). Without a view of the causes of institutional change, the author argues that all that is necessary to change the economic situation of the underdeveloped peoples is to enlighten the leaders. We should be so glad to have such a great mind who is establishing consulting positions with ~20 of the world's leaders. Sounds like things are on the right track :) More enlightened academics who recognize the nature of institutional change have argued that revolutions (and the threat thereof), along with other forms of collective action play a fundamental role in changing institutions, such as property rights and access to the legitimization of capital. People in political power got there for a reason. They have an established interest in the structure of society that is providing profits to industries and/or union groups that support him/her. Withholding property rights to the unorganized squatting masses both a) decreases the supply of capital (increasing rents to established formal capital) and b) increases the supply of cheap labor (further increasing the return on established capital). Squatters don't need to have their current leaders "enlightened". The leaders are enlightened enough. The squatters and marginalized masses need organization grounded in a sense of common purpose. Either the threat of a revolution or an actual revolution has caused the type of fundamental reorganization necessary to legitimize the squatters in society. In sum, the book is interesting in some respects. The high-level idea of the book is correct: the marginalized masses need to have thier informal institutions incorporated into the formal institutions to spur economic prosperity. However, this is not an apolitical task.

2022-10-26 05:36