Historical economics and evolutionary economic policy
The recent literature evaluating Coase’s work in the light of evolutionary economics has come to distinguish between two Coasean traditions, one appropriated by the economic mainstream, the other identifying a significant heterodox potential. It is the aim of this chapter to take the latter reception of Coase’s legacy as the starting point for exploring his contribution in the light of recent debates on an evolutionary approach to economic policy. Contrary to attempts to label Coase as an arch neo-liberal, one can identify a commitment to the primacy of institutional direction rather than decentralised allocation of resources across markets as the core building block of his outlook on economic policy. This leads to an interpretation of Coase’s approach in terms of a historico-empirical method of comparative institutional analysis, which calls both for a hermeneutical approach to economic policy evaluation, and constitutes a form of historical economics that offers an ambitious research agenda for attempts to move the conceptualisation of history in evolutionary economics beyond affirmations of the relevance of path-dependent processes. What Coase ultimately offers to evolutionary economics is the prospect of a morphological analysis, exhibiting interesting parallels to recent developments in evolutionary ‘Evo-Devo’ biology that have re-established the relevance of ontogenetic approaches to developmental processes.
Preprint: 2005-Klaes-HistEcsCoase-preprint.pdf
Bibliographical details of final and authoritative version:
Klaes, M. 2005. Historical Economics and Evolutionary Economic Policy - Coasean Perspectives. In Kurt Dopfer ed. Economics, Evolution and the State. Cheltenham: Elgar 2005, pp. 78-96.
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