|
|
REVISTA DE ECONOMÍA
INSTITUCIONAL No. 5, SECOND SEMESTER 2001
Making Sense of Institutions as
a Factor Shaping Economic Performance 
Richard Nelson y Bhaven N. Sampat [pdf] [html]
[Key words: institutions, economic growth, rutines, social
technologies, physical technologies JEL: B30, B41, K00,
L10, O10]
There has recently been a resurgence of interest in how
institutions affect economic performance. A review of this
literature reveals that the concept of an ‘institution’
means different things to different scholars, both within
economics and across the social sciences. This paper discusses
what factors unify the different definitions of institutions,
and develops a concept of institutions useful for the analysis
of economic performance, and economic growth in particular.
Specifically, it develops the notion of institutions as
standard ‘social technologies’. Economic growth
results from the co-evolution of physical and social technologies.
How Rational is Popper’s
Rationality Principle?
Boris Salazar [pdf] [html]
[Key words: rationality, economic methodology, evolutionary
games, social conventions, Nash equilibrium, JEL: B41, D79,
C70]
This paper shows the relevance of Popper's Rationality
Principle (RP) for the appraisal of the impressive mass
work emerging, in recent years, in the fields of rationality,
learning, evolutionary games and behavioral economic theory.
In contradistinction to the well-known rigid criteria of
the falsacionist Popper, the RP covers a large and diverse
spectrum of behaviors compatible with the minimal idea of
‘acting in accordance with the situation’. Its
relevance to understand the formation of social conventions
or how agents learn ‘to play Nash equilibrium’
is argued at length here.
Multicausality, Impunity
and Violence: An Alternative Approach
Fernando Gaitán Daza [pdf] [html]
[Key words: violence, impunity, justice system, organized
crime, JEL: K 14, K42, K49]
This paper criticizes multicausal and penal impunity explanations
of violence and crime. It shows the analytical limits of
identifying state and social institutional failure with
objective causes of violence. But also highlights that impunity
indicators cannot be confused with impunity itself. After
showing those limits, it proposes an alternative approach
based on two central facts that have been ignored: organized
crime nature and the breakdown of colombian justice and
security systems.
|
|
