1. INSTITUTIONALISM AND CONVENTIONAL ECONOMICS: COMPLEMENTS OR SUBSTITUTES?
- Author
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Daniel III, Coidwell
- Subjects
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GOVERNMENT policy , *ECONOMIC policy , *ECONOMIC indicators , *INFORMAL sector ,UNITED States economy - Abstract
The article presents response of the author on comments made by Lewis E. Hill on the papers "Toward a Reconciliation of Institutional Economics and Its Critics" and "Beyond the Market Economy Building Institutions That Work," by Clarence E. Ayres that were published in the March 1970 issue of the periodical "Social Science Quarterly." Under appropriate arrangements for doing things, that is, under an appropriate institutional structure, the propensity to truck and barter naturally entails the creation of markets, which are themselves arrangements for effecting exchange. In the U.S., the institutional structure is such that markets permeate most of the economy. For example, in August 1970, nearly 84 per cent of total civilian employment was in the private sector, all of which consists of regulated and more or less unregulated markets. Thus, employing scholar Robert L. Heilbroner's system of classification, the economy of the U.S. would be appropriately designated as essentially a market system, as the author did in his introduction to Ayres' classic. "Institutionalism and Economic Development." But Ayres objects to him, that the U.S. economy is an industrial economy. Unfortunately, his is not intended to be a cross-classification, which, if correct, would be a suitable complement rather than a substitute for the one that the author employed, since Ayres says prefatorily, and the author flatly denies that the U.S. economy is a market economy.
- Published
- 1971