货币传导机制与货币政策完善.doc

经典名篇 经典名篇 PAGE 56 PAGE 57 THE NEW INSTITUTIONAL ECONOMICS AND THIRD WORLD DEVELOPMENT Douglass C. North This chapter is intended briefly to summarise the essential characteristics of the new institutional economics, to describe how it differs from neo-classical theory, and then to apply its analytical framework to problems of development. INSTITUTIONS AND ECONOMIC THEORY The new institutional economics is an attempt to incorporate a theory of institutions into economics.1 However, in contrast to the many earlier attempts to overturn or replace neo-classical theory, the new institutional economics builds on, modifies and extends neo-classical theory to permit it to come to grips and deal with an entire range of issues heretofore beyond its ken. What it retains and builds on is the fundamental assumption of scarcity and hence competition—the basis of the choice theoretic approach that underlies micro-economics. What it abandons is instrumental rationality—the assumption of neo-classical economics that has made it an institution-free theory. Herbert Simon has accurately summarised the implications of this neo-classical assumption as follows. If values are accepted as given and constant, if an objective description of the world as it really is can be postulated, and if it is assumed that the decision-maker’s computational powers are unlimited, then two important consequences follow. First, it is not necessary to distinguish between the real world and the decision-maker’s perception of it: he or she perceives the world as it really is. Second, it is possible to predict the choices that will be made by a rational decision-maker entirely from a knowledge of the real world and without a knowledge of the decision-maker’s perceptions or modes of calculation (of course, his or her utility function must be known) (simon 1986:210). In a world of instrumental rationality institutions are unnecessary; ideas and ideologies don’t matter: and efficient markets—both economic