Culture and Development: Reflections on Part III of Douglass North's Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance

Abstract

This paper reviews and comments Part III of Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance, by Douglass North, a point of confluence of all the thought of this author. We present a summary of each of the three chapters that constitute this Part as well as a comment to the work under review, where we highlight some of the more subtle and merely implicit aspects of it. We conclude that the North approach, although not giving definitive answers, offers an integrated, coherent and "economic" perspective (in the sense of the definition of Economics) of the economic history, stresses the importance of the institutions, the incentives derived from them and the subsequent decisions, reinforced by the path dependence and suggests informal constraints – within which the role of the culture of each nation stands out – as the next goal to be achieved in understanding the process of economic development.