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.
JEL Classification: B25; O10.
Keywords: Economic development new institutional economics history of economic thought