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The discipline of institutional economics has gained increasing prominence in recent years, because standard economic explanations can often not come to grips with major contemporary policy issues, such as economic reform in affluent, but dysfunctional economies, the transformation of the failed socialist command economies and the governance problems of the new industrial economies. Institutional economists point out that rule systems matter greatly to explaining these problems and that institutional innovation is central to finding sustained solutions. Institutions must underpin increasingly complex webs of human interaction because interaction and coordination depend on tenuous links of trust.

This major book provides an accessible introduction to the burgeoning discipline of institutional economics, and to the central issues of private property rights and their competitive use. The book develops the issue from fundamental premises about human cognition and motivation. It includes policy-oriented discussions of:

• the logical basis of institutions and why institutions matter
• the institutional arrangements underpinning domestic markets and international exchange where human action is coordinated by private choice
• the institutional arrangements underpinning business organizations
• the functions of government and the relative merits of private and public choice, as well as solutions to controlling the opportunistic use of political power
• possible reforms in heavily regulated mature economies that have to meet the challenge from new competitors
• the reasons for the collapse of the socialist institutional system
• the influence of globalization on institutional development during the modernization process in third-world countries

This text breaks new ground in that it summarises the contemporary institutional literature in a cohesive manner.

The book will not only be welcomed by the student of economics but will also be essential to jurists, business managers, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, social historians and moral philosophers.