Daron Acemoglu é professor no MIT e tem trabalhado sobre questões relacionadas á economia politica, desenvolvimento económico, crescimento económico etc. Recentemente tem centrado suas analises na importância das instituições para o desenvolvimento económico. Encontrei uma reportagem sobre ele na revista Finance & Development, March 2010, Volume 47, Number 1 publicado pelo FMI e aproveito para sublinhar alguns trechos da reportagem que julguei interessante partilhar.
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“Without regulations and predictable laws, markets won’t work,”
“Every single market we have in the world is regulated, it’s just a question of degree,”
“When you have some judge who will enforce laws, that’s regulation. This is much more palpable in developing economies, where markets don’t work precisely because the necessary regulations and institutions are missing. Governments are often barriers to the functioning of markets, but if you really want markets to function you need governments to support them—with law and order, regulation, and public services.”
“If you want to fully understand the wider macro picture—growth, political economy, long-run issues—you have to understand underlying micro principles such as incentives, allocation of resources, technological change, and capital accumulation.”
About the global economic and financial crisis that hit in earnest in 2008?
The institutional foundations of markets had been forgotten, and free markets had been equated with unregulated markets. Few would now argue that market monitoring is sufficient to guard against opportunistic behavior by unregulated, profit-seeking individuals taking risks from which they stand to benefit and others lose.
“Greed—for lack of a better word—is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.”
“A deep and important contribution of the discipline of economics is the insight that greed is neither good nor bad in the abstract. When channeled into profit-maximizing, competitive, and innovative behavior under the auspices of sound laws and regulations, greed can act as the engine of innovation and economic growth. But when unchecked by the appropriate institutions and regulations, it will degenerate into rent-seeking, corruption, and crime.”
“Everybody responds to incentives. For the vast majority of people, there is a continuum between ambition and greed, and this is where institutions play a role. Institutions can put a stop to excess by functions such as the regulation of monopolies so that they don’t crush the opposition. Greed is only bad if it is channeled into doing bad things. Institutions can channel greed into excellence.”
“We have done a lot of empirical work that shows a very clear causal link between inclusive economic institutions—those that encourage participation by a broad cross section of society, enforce property rights, prevent expropriation—and economic growth,”
“The link to growth from democratic political institutions is not as clear.”
Acemoglu acknowledges that economic growth can be generated by authoritarian regimes, but insists that it cannot be sustained.
Why Do Nations Fail?
“Dysfunctional societies degenerate into failed states,” asserts Acemoglu, “but we can do something about it. We can build states with infrastructure and law and order in which people are confident and comfortable going into business and relying on public services, but there is no political will to do that. You would not need armies to implement such a scheme—just a functioning bureaucracy to lay down the institutional foundations of markets.”
Why some countries reach economic takeoff and some do not?
This will partly involve an account of how policies and institutions directly affect whether a society can embark on modern economic growth. These policies and institutions will determine the society’s reward structure and whether investments are profitable; its contract enforcement, law and order, and infrastructure; its market formation and whether more efficient entities can replace those that are less efficient.
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Sendo as instituições, fundamentais para o desenvolvimento de nações, como poderemos arquitectar o arcabouço institucional necessário para o nosso desenvolvimento? Eis um tema desafiante para os economistas.
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