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El artículo discurre sobre las teorías económicas conocidas como el neoclasicismo y el clásico. El autor comenta sobre el concepto del institucionalismo en la filosofía económica y describe la influencia de las escuelas históricas de la economía en la teoría económica moderna. También se considera la evolución del pensamiento económico.

Since its beginnings, and more clearly since the mid 1800, Economics has been resting on the assumption that economic agents make rational decisions, maximizing their utility or well-being according to their own preferences and interests. The economic order resulting from that plurality of rational decisions is regarded as an efficient and Pareto-optimum one. Several authors have questioned the validity of those assumptions, and this has entailed a gradual transformation of the assumptions. This paper discusses the problems faced by the idea of a fully rational Homo economicus, the adjustments and defensive measures adopted by various tendencies within Economics to overcome those problems and counter various related theoretical and methodological criticisms. The paper also discusses more recent conceptions of economic reality that are at variance with the traditional view, especially those linked to behavioural, institutional and evolutionary Economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decade, the concept of social capital has been widely accepted by academics, advisors and government officials, who have attributed to it virtuous effects on economic and social development. However, theoretical and applied literature gives many different meanings to the concept of social capital, leading to methodological difficulties. Thus, the concept of social capital is merely the entrance to a theoretical structure under construction, whose components and 'materials' come from different approaches. From a mainstream economics approach, the New Institutionalism offers important elements for the construction of this theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows how some of the most important concepts of the New Institutional Economics (NIE) can be expressed in terms of Implementation Theory (IT). First, it explains some of the expressions used by the NIE, such as institutions, transaction costs, property rights and methodological individualism. Afterwards, it gives a wide definition of the IT in order to establish correspondences between both theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]