We can all agree that institutions matter, though as to which institutions matter most, and how much any of them matter, the matter is, paraphrasing Douglass North's words at the Nobel podium, unresolved after seven decades of immense effort. We suggest that the obstacle to progress is the paradigm of the New Institutional Economics itself. In this paper, we propose a new theory that is: grounded in institutions as coevolving sources of economic growth rather than as rules constraining growth; and deployed in dynamical systems theory rather than game theory. We show that with our approach some long-standing problems are resolved, in particular, the paradoxical and perplexingly pervasive influence of informal constraints on the long-run character of economies.

中文翻译：

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共同发展的制度和非正式约束的悖论

我们都同意制度很重要，尽管至于哪些制度最重要，以及其中有多少重要，问题是，套用道格拉斯·诺斯在诺贝尔奖讲台上的话，经过七十年的巨大努力后仍未解决。我们认为进步的障碍是新制度经济学本身的范式。在本文中，我们提出了一个新的理论，即：以制度为基础，作为经济增长的共同发展来源，而不是作为限制增长的规则；并部署在动力系统理论而不是博弈论中。我们表明，通过我们的方法，一些长期存在的问题得到了解决，特别是非正式约束对经济体长期特征的矛盾和令人费解的普遍影响。