Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T06:08:27.419Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Institutional interconnections: understanding symbiotic relationships

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 December 2017

NADIA VON JACOBI Open the ORCID record for NADIA VON JACOBI [Opens in a new window]
NADIA VON JACOBI*
Affiliation:
Said Business School, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Pavia, Pavia, IT
*
*Email: [email protected] or [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Institutions are the driving features of economic and human development. Together with other social structures they influence the trajectories of societal change. Such factors are however tightly connected and should not be analysed in isolation but considered as interdependent with each other. This study contributes to the understanding of interconnections among institutions and other structural factors by focusing on two features: the manifold nature of linkages and the possibility of relations being asymmetric. An analogy to symbiotic relationships, common in ecology, serves as inspiration for an innovative methodological strategy to empirically study multiple interconnections. Focusing on the Brazilian municipality level, the study includes 54 structural factors in a correlation network. Empirical results include the identification of centroids, meaning most connected factors, which tend to gain or lose importance at higher levels of municipal development; and the identification of positive asymmetric relationships between structural factors, which may inform on system dynamics.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Institutional Economics , Volume 14 , Issue 5 , October 2018 , pp. 853 - 876
Copyright
Copyright © Millennium Economics Ltd 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alatas, V., Banerjee, A., Chandrasekhar, A. G., Hanna, R. and Olken, B. A. (2012). Network structure and the aggregation of information: Theory and evidence from Indonesia. Technical report, National Bureau of Economic Research.Google Scholar
Amable, B. (2016). Institutional complementarities in the dynamic comparative analysis of capitalism. Journal of Institutional Economics, 12 (1): 79–103.Google Scholar
Ansell, C. (2006). Network Institutionalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, Chapter 5.Google Scholar
Aoki, M. (2001). Toward a Comparative Institutional Analysis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Arthur, W. B. (1989). Competing technologies, increasing returns, and lock-in by historical events. Economic Journal, 99 (394): 116–31.Google Scholar
Arthur, W. B., Ermoliev, Y. M., and Kaniovski, Y. M. (1987). Path-dependent processes and the emergence of macro-structure. European Journal of Operational Research, 30 (3): 294–303.Google Scholar
Bassanini, A. and Duval, R. (2009). Unemployment, institutions, and reform complementarities: re-assessing the aggregate evidence for OECD countries. Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 25 (1): 40–59.Google Scholar
Battistini, A. and Pagano, U. (2008). Primates’ fertilization systems and the evolution of the human brain. Journal of Bioeconomics, 10 (1): 1–21.Google Scholar
Belloc, M. and Bowles, S. (2013). The persistence of inferior cultural-institutional conventions. American Economic Review, 103 (3): 93–8.Google Scholar
Bennett, D. L. and Nikolaev, B. (2016). Factor endowments, the rule of law and structural inequality. Journal of Institutional Economics, 12 (4): 773–95.Google Scholar
Bowles, S., Choi, J.-K., and Hopfensitz, A. (2003). The co-evolution of individual behaviors and social institutions. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 223 (2): 135–47.Google Scholar
Bowles, S., Durlauf, S. N. and Hoff, K. (2006). Poverty traps. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Boyer, P. and Petersen, M. B. (2012). The naturalness of (many) social institutions: evolved cognition as their foundation. Journal of Institutional Economics, 8 (1): 1.Google Scholar
Boyer, P. and Petersen, M. B. (2013). Studying institutions in the context of natural selection: limits or opportunities? Journal of Institutional Economics, 9 (2): 187–98.Google Scholar
Cain, M. L., Bowman, W. D., and Hacker, S. D. (2011). Ecology. Sunderland: Sinauer Associates.Google Scholar
Chang, H.-J. (2011). Institutions and economic development: theory, policy and history. Journal of Institutional Economics, 7 (4): 437–98.Google Scholar
Crouch, C., Streeck, W., Boyer, R., Amable, B., Hall, P. A., and Jackson, G. (2005). Dialogue on institutional complementarity and political economy. Socio-Economic Review, 3 (2): 359–82.Google Scholar
Dacin, M. T., Goodstein, J. and Scott, W. R. (2002). Institutional theory and institutional change: Introduction to the special research forum. Academy of Management Journal, 45 (1): 45–56.Google Scholar
De Bary, A. (1879). Die Erscheinung der Symbiose. Strasburg: Verlag von Karl J. Trübner.Google Scholar
Freeman, L. C. (1977). A set of measures of centrality based on betweenness. Sociometry, 40 (1): 35–41.Google Scholar
Green, H. D. Jr and Wasserman, S. (2013). Network analysis: a definitional guide to important concepts. Oxford Handbook of Quantitative Methods in Psychology, Volume 1. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hall, P. A. and Soskice, D. (2001). Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Higgins, S. and Pereira, C. (2014). The effects of Brazil's taxation and social spending on the distribution of household income. Public Finance Review, 42 (3): 346–67.Google Scholar
Hodgson, G. (2015). Institutional change. Presented at ‘Institutions and Social Innovation: a Mutual Feeding’, 29–30 January, Pavia, Italy. Available at http://fondazionefeltrinelli.it/app/uploads/2015/01/LABEXPO_THINKSHOP-on-INSTITUTIONS-PUBLIC-1.pdf (accessed 30 October 2017).Google Scholar
Hodgson, G. M. and Knudsen, T. (2010). Darwin's Conjecture: The Search for General Principles of Social and Economic Evolution. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Hodgson, G. M. and Stoelhorst, J. W. (2014). Introduction to the special issue on the future of institutional and evolutionary economics. Journal of Institutional Economics, 10 (4): 513–40.Google Scholar
Höpner, M. (2005). Epilogue to ‘explaining institutional complementarity’: what have we learnt? Complementarity, coherence and institutional change. Socio-Economic Review, 3 (2): 383–7.Google Scholar
Horvath, S. (2011). Weighted Network Analysis: Applications in Genomics and Systems Biology. Dordrecht: Springer Science & Business Media.Google Scholar
Kingston, C. and Caballero, G. (2009). Comparing theories of institutional change. Journal of Institutional Economics, 5 (2): 151–80.Google Scholar
Kunčič, A. (2014). Institutional quality dataset. Journal of Institutional Economics, 10 (1): 135–61.Google Scholar
Langlois, R. N. (2016). Institutions for getting out of the way. Journal of Institutional Economics, 12 (1): 53–61.Google Scholar
North, D. C. (1990). Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Pagano, U. and Rossi, M. A. (2004). Incomplete contracts, intellectual property and institutional complementarities. European Journal of Law and Economics, 18 (1): 55–76.Google Scholar
Pagano, U. and Rowthorn, R. (1994). Ownership, technology and institutional stability. Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, 5 (2): 221–42.Google Scholar
Pagano, U. and Vatiero, M. (2015). Costly institutions as substitutes: novelty and limits of the Coasian approach. Journal of Institutional Economics, 11 (2): 265–81.Google Scholar
Pande, R. and Udry, C. (2006). Institutions and development: a view from below. Economic Growth Center Discussion Paper 928, Yale University.Google Scholar
Pierson, P. (2004). Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University PressGoogle Scholar
Ray, D. (2007). Development Economics, in Blume, L. and Durlauf, S. (eds), New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. London: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Seo, M.-G. and Creed, W. D. (2002). Institutional contradictions, praxis, and institutional change: a dialectical perspective. Academy of Management Review, 27 (2): 222–247.Google Scholar
Sindzingre, A. N. (2014). Institutions as a composite concept: Explaining their indeterminate relationship with economic development. Greenwich: World Interdisciplinary Network for Institutional Research Inaugural Conference, 11–14 September.Google Scholar
Streeck, W. and Thelen, K. A. (2005). Beyond Continuity: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Thévenon, O. (2016). Do institutional complementarities foster female labour force participation? Journal of Institutional Economics, 12 (2): 471–97.Google Scholar
Tomera, A. N. (1979). Understanding Basic Ecological Concepts. Portland, ME: J. Weston Walch Publishing.Google Scholar
von Jacobi, N. (2014a). Meso-factors of development: the role of the context for human development achievements.Google Scholar
von Jacobi, N. (2014b). The role of social participation for women's ability to combine motherhood and employment security in Mali and Ghana. Étude de la Population Africaine, 28 (2): 834.Google Scholar
WB (2016). Retaking the path to inclusion, growth and sustainability. Brazil systematic country diagnostic. Washington, DC: World Bank,Google Scholar
Witt, U. (2014). The future of evolutionary economics: why the modalities of explanation matter. Journal of Institutional Economics, 10 (4): 645–64.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Von Jacobi supplementary material

Von Jacobi supplementary material 1

Download Von Jacobi supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 5.2 MB