An Institutionalist Perspective on the Future of the Capitalist World-Economy

摘要

The term world-economy in our title must have already given a hint to the careful reader of our purpose in writing this paper: We intend to bridge institutional economics with world-systems analysis in order to enhance the global applicability of the former. World-economy is a term used by Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein and means a space defined by the existence of a single division of labor (coexistent with multiple States) whereas world economy would indicate the arithmetic summation of national economies each of which would possess a division of labor and a State of its own (Wallerstein 1979, 6). World-economy is useful for treating the unity by recourse to its common dynamics constitutive of economic inequalities and power asymmetries. If in the wake of so-called "globalization" there is now a pervasive discourse on global governance as the nascent institutional setup of the global economy, we might as well as treat this new concept in relation with the systemic unity and asymmetries to which it corresponds. Nevertheless, the two approaches remain wide apart in spite of a common heritage they share. For example, in the syllabus of a postdoctoral seminar, Wallerstein identified Karl Polanyi along with Joseph Schumpeter as among the few "immediate and forgotten predecessors of world-systems analysis" (1994). His colleague Terence K. Hopkins was a young participant in Polanyi's interdisciplinary research team at Colombia University on economic anthropology.