CRETE 28-31 OCTOBER 2004
ECONOMICS, HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENT
From the very start of the discipline, economists have been concerned with the relationship between historical evolution and economic progress. However, since the Second World War the issues of history, space and development have lost most of their lustre within economic theory.
Over the past decades, a new phase of 'economics imperialism' has signified a revival of mainstream interest in the relationship between the social and the economic. Not surprisingly, the fields of economic history and development economics are at the forefront of these new initiatives. Indeed, economic history was amongst the first fields where an earlier phase of economic imperialism was tested during the 60s, through the application of economic modeling and quantitative analysis, giving rise to cliometrics or the new economic history. More recently, the initiatives have been revitalized by the applications of the new information economics and the new institutional economics. Parallels can be observed in the emergence and strengthening of the new development economics.
The rediscovery of the social, the historical, the spatial, the institutional and the developmental, has not led to major innovations in methodology or theory within mainstream economics. Thus, while interest in the relationship between the economy, society geography and history is reaching new heights, the analytical content of new developments has not kept pace.
This raises an acute challenge, both substantive and strategic, for those working in evolutionary, institutional and Marxist economics, who remain wedded to an understanding based on a systemic and historical content. How ready is evolutionary political economy to face these challenges? The evolutionary and institutional paradigm has produced important ideas on the understanding of evolutionary processes, the analysis of economic complexity, the dynamics of institutional change, and many other fields. Is the time ripe to attempt to weld these ideas into a unified framework that might allow us to put history and economic development back at centre stage?
Conference Local Organisers
Dimitris Milonakis (chairman),
George Argitis
Yorgos Stassinopoulos