The New Institutional Economics, Business Associations, and Development

ABSTRACT With the demise of development economics in the 1970s, the academic discipline of economics had little specific theorizing on development to offer practioners and proffered instead universal, liberal nostrums of free trade and free markets (Wing, 1990). These universal prescriptions evolved into the first catalogued Washington consensus in the 1980s on the urgency of market-oriented reforms in developing countries (Williamson, 1990). In the 1990s, a new connection formed between an emerging institutionalist subfield in economics and the next consensus in Washington after the first generation of market-oriented reforms. The opening of the third annual meetings of the International Society for New Institutional Economics (ISNIE) at World Bank headquarters in Washington, D.C. in September 1999 symbolized this new connection.

摘要 随着20世纪70年代发展经济学（development economics）的式微，经济学这一学术学科几乎未能为从业者提供有关发展问题的专属理论阐释，转而提出了以自由贸易与自由市场为核心的普适性自由主义政策主张（Wing, 1990）。这类普适性政策方案在20世纪80年代演变为首个被系统梳理的华盛顿共识（Washington consensus），其核心要义为发展中国家亟需推行市场化改革（Williamson, 1990）。20世纪90年代，经济学领域新兴的制度主义分支与首轮市场化改革后华盛顿方面形成的新一轮共识之间形成了新的关联。1999年9月，新制度经济学国际学会（International Society for New Institutional Economics, ISNIE）第三届年会在华盛顿特区的世界银行总部开幕，这一事件标志着这一新关联的正式形成。