Prepared for the Task Force on “Industrial Policies and Development”, within the Initiative for Policy Dialogue (IPD), directed by Joseph Stiglitz at the Columbia University, New York.

Bibliografía: p. 20-23.

This chapter notes that all historical experiences of sustained economic growth — starting at least from the English Industrial Revolution — find their enabling conditions in a rich set of complementary institutions, shared behavioral norms, and public policies. Indeed, the paramount importance of institutions and social norms appears to be a rather universal property of every form of collective organization we are aware of. Moreover, much more narrowly, discretionary public policies have been major ingredients of national development strategies, especially in catching-up countries, throughout the history of modern capitalism. Conversely, from a symmetric perspective, there are extremely sound theoretical reasons supporting the notion that institutions and policies always matter in all processes of technological learning and economic coordination and change. This chapter focuses on the latter issue and outlines some theoretical foundations and for industrial policies in a broad sense, and for measures of “institutional engineering” shaping the very nature of the economic actors, the market mechanisms and rules under which they operate, and the boundaries between what is governed by market interactions, and what is not.

Bibliografía de la asignatura Economía Industrial. Licenciatura en Economía (plan 2009), 2do semestre.