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This chapter looks at the institutions that are pertinent to economic development and at the institutional impediments to growth, drawing on several strands of the literature on organizational behaviour, including the New Institutional Economics. It begins with a discussion on informal mercantile institutions of trust, commitment, and enforcement, and then examines the strategic distributive conflicts behind institutional change. Next, it discusses the role of the state in building institutions, acknowledging the facts that there are states both strong and ‘soft’, and that the ‘soft budget constraint’ of the state gives rise to a credibility problem. An analysis of desirable state intervention—that which deals with market failures such as externalities and with coordination failures—and of distortional intervention involving rent‐seeking and corruption follows. This positive analysis of policy making includes a principal‐agent model in which the state acts like a Stackleberg leader.

After initial comments on the role of Greek inscriptions as ‘archives’, this chapter reviews the drastic changes that have occurred since Finley's book of 1973 in the picture of the ancient economy, both by acknowledging development and growth, and by adopting new concepts, not least New Institutional Economics with its emphasis on transaction costs. The methodological impact of such new approaches is sketched in four fields, each of which is illustrated with epigraphic documentation: (1) production and growth, instancing technological advance, land exploitation and textile production; (2) finance, taxes, trade and prices, with emphasis on the need and opportunities for quantification; (3) money and coinage; and (4) the transformation of uncertainty into an assessment of risk, illustrated in respect of farming practices and recourse to consultation of oracles and curse-tablets.

This chapter evaluates new institutional economic theory and its approach to explaining economic transformation and political order. It explains the key assumptions of the ‘old’ New Institutional Economics, associated with the work of Douglass North prior to 2009. It then sets out the more recent developments within New Institutional Economics that engages more explicitly with power, in the work of Acemoglu, Robinson and North et al. The chapter evaluates the extent to which these theories can help explain Tanzania and Vietnam’s experiences of political reform and economic change over the era of high growth. The chapter argues that while the ‘new’-New Institutional Economics of development correctly identifies the importance of power in explaining economic transformation, these theories remained tied to a number of restrictive neoclassical assumptions that limits the extent to which they can illuminate processes of contemporary economic change.

This chapter analyses the motivations of economic actors in classical Athens from the point of view of modern behavioural economics. The (now) old orthodoxy of M.I. Finley, drawing on Bücher and Weber, stressed that the so‐ called homo economicus did not exist until recent times: in antiquity, an anti‐productive mentality was essentially hard‐wired into the minds of elite Greeks and Romans, preventing economic development. This approach has been widely rejected in recent years, and in particular the methods of New Institutional Economics (NIE) have provided a way around the moribund formalist‐primitivist debate. Yet whilst NIE has provided a set of important analytical tools, it would be an exaggeration to claim that these tools can solve every problem relating to economic activity in antiquity; here, the insights of behavioural economics can assist us in understanding economic activity in past societies.

Scholars working in the New Institutional Economics take it as axiomatic that economic growth cannot happen without secure property rights. In his magisterial survey of the economy of the Greek cities, Alain Bresson has followed suit in asserting that security of property was a precondition for the development of market exchange, fuelling the growth that the Greek world so evidently experienced over the course of the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic periods. Yet careful consideration suggests that property in ancient Greece was comparatively insecure. This chapter explores the ways in which individuals could and did lose their property and asks how we are to understand the phenomenon of widespread economic growth in this light.

This chapter describes the conceptual framework used by the book to study the economy of ancient Greece. It begins with a discussion of the debate between “primitivists,” represented by Karl Bücher, and “modernists,” represented by Eduard Meyer, over the nature of the ancient Greek economy. It considers Bücher's adherence to the so-called German Historical School of Political Economy and goes on to examine the views of Moses I. Finley and Max Weber regarding the ancient economy, Karl Polanyi's use of institutionalism as an approach to the study of the ancient economy, and the main assumptions of New Institutional Economics (NIE) with regard to the genesis and evolution of institutions. The chapter also analyzes the transaction costs theory and concludes with an assessment of criticisms against the classical economists' economic agent, the homo economicus, and the influence of constrained choices and limited rationality on economic performance.

This chapter summarizes the core arguments around the working of madrasas and Islam in Pakistan, and notes the relevance of these findings for deepening our understanding of informal institutions in general. It demonstrates their particular significance for students of both theory and practice of international development. Drawing on empirical evidence on the workings of Islam, as represented through the choices and decisions of actors within the madrasas of Pakistan, this book provides an understanding of the workings of informal institutions and thus demonstrates the strength of the New Institutional Economics (NIE) analytical framework in explaining a noneconomic institution. In the process, it shows the adjustments that need to be made to the core assumptions of the classical rational choice theory if this is to act as a unifying framework across the social sciences.

This chapter sets out the conceptual framework for the book. A review of existing literature on the economic lives of refugees reveals that few economists have worked on refugees and forced displacement. Despite pioneering interdisciplinary research on refugees’ economic lives, there remains a lack of theory and data to explain variation in economic outcomes for refugees. To fill this gap, the chapter elaborates the concept of ‘refugee economies’, i.e. resource allocation systems relating to the lives of refugees. Drawing upon New Institutional Economics, it argues that while refugees are not necessarily distinctive as people, what distinguishes them in an economic sense is the institutional context of ‘being a refugee’, which leads to a different set of economic constraints and opportunities compared to citizens or other migrants. The chapter suggests what these institutional differences are and how this conceptual framework plays out in the context of the Uganda research that follows.

This chapter explores the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of the discourse on ancient economies, and seeks to apply recent models and concepts to the north Aegean area. Twentieth-century historians of antiquity have followed their nineteenth-century forebears in emphasizing the close connection between the social and the economic. The connection is explored in terms of market relations, focusing particularly on the demand for markets, whether among Xenophon's ‘Cyrean’ mercenaries, trying to get across north-west Asia Minor and serving in south-eastern Thrace; or in terms of the regulations for selling or purchasing slaves and pack animals at Abdera. The demand for particular commodities was driven by social expectations which, in the northern Aegean, were led by the high-ranking followers and associates of the ruling dynasties. Evidence within the north Aegean region suggests a different set of social emphases from the impressions given by Athenian drama and forensic oratory.

Chapter 1 provides the basic motivation for the book, which is to understand the origins of California water law and the development and use of water as a central part of how gold mining is done. It begins by describing the state of present scholarly understanding of these origins, as well as the gap in our understanding. It goes on to outline the basic theoretical approach taken, which is to apply a number of notions of the determinants of institutional change taken from the New Institutional Economics. Finally, it describes a number of scholarly threads in Gold Rush historiography, focusing mostly on work done by economic historians on Gold Rush institutions, and it describes the contribution of the research to this literature.

This chapter sets out the main issues discussed in this book regarding the position of the Italians in the Republican period. It summarizes earlier scholarly views on integration and identity and presents the most recent theories regarding these concepts. In doing so, it reviews earlier literature on the much-debated issue of Romanization. It also introduces economic theories that will be applied in the book, such as New Institutional Economics. Furthermore, the chapter gives a basic overview of the various legal statuses that existed in Republican Italy. Finally, this chapter gives an introduction into the sources and methodology used in this study.

This introductory chapter outlines the book’s theme and the main questions that will be addressed. It discusses the merits and drawbacks of the various theoretical approaches that have been applied to the analysis of land and natural resources in the Roman economy until now—market-models, substantivist analysis, and population-resources modelling. It concludes with an argument in favour of a New Institutional Economics (NIE) approach.

Institutional reforms and their contribution to development and growth have been the subject of numerous studies and the source of many challenges in the scientific literature and among policymakers. Endorsing an economic perspective, this book addresses the controversial issues at stake through the experience of the public procurement reforms carried out in sub-Saharan Africa since the late 1990s. Using an original dataset, this book explores the gap between the expectations and the accomplishment achieved in that difficult process. The analysis focuses on three aspects. First, the book outlines the conditions and forces leading to institutional change. It then develops a framework based mainly on new institutional economics to assess and discuss why the progress towards modernizing procurement systems has been so limited. Last, it examines the organizational arrangements that play a central role in the success or failures of these reforms.

This book has dealt with the exploitation and management of land and natural resources in the Roman economy, with the aim of investigating whether or not Roman strategies of land and resource exploitation were conducive to economic growth. Despite the recent surge of interest in Roman economic history, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the exploitation of land and natural resources. Drawing inspiration from insights developed within the field of NIE, the book has asked whether or not Roman institutions made possible forms of land and resource exploitation that would result in increased productivity and growth over time. The chapters have considered issues such as ownership, (legal) control, and the (organizational framework for) exploitation and processing of vital resources and raw materials such as agricultural land, livestock, water, precious metals, salt, stone, and others, throughout the Mediterranean region and beyond during Roman, late Roman, and immediately post-Roman times.