Instituições, regras e hábitos: proposições teóricas e aplicadas para estudos rurais

Abstract

Institutional Economics is a heterodox economic approach with an important rise in the academic world since the 1980s, especially after the Nobel Prizes in Economics awarded to Ronald Coase (1991), Douglass North (1993) and Oliver Williamson (2009). This growth is based on the systematization of an analysis model represented in the New Institutional Economy (NEI), through the relationship between Institutions and Development (in North's macroanalytical approach) and Transaction Cost Economics (in the microanalytical approach originated in Coase and developed by Williamson). Its assumptions have been widely applied in agro-industrial phenomena in Brazil since the 1990s, resulting in a diversity of publications on the themes of contracts, transaction costs, governance structures, opportunism, institutions and development in the agricultural environment. However, Institutional Economics is a broader, more critical and rich current of economic thought, composed not only by the NIS, but by approaches such as Original Institutionalism, based on the strong influence of authors such as Thorstein Veblen and John Commons, and its recent reconstruction in a contemporary and evolutionary institutionalist thought. Because of its greater theoretical complexity, defining history as a central element, rejecting methodological individualism and taking a more critical view of the economic mainstream, the original institutionalist approaches do not determine a single model of analysis, and it is a methodological challenge to bring your ideas closer to empirical phenomena. More recently, since the years 2010, research efforts have grown to overcome this challenge. The legacy of Veblen and Commons and the evolutionary bias of Geoffrey Hodgson have inspired several theoretical-empirical propositions in the field of Rural Economics, contrasting with the methodological uniqueness of the NEI. However, these contributions are still sparse and need better systematization, summary and scientific dissemination. Thus, the preparation of this book has the central objective of developing an analytical framework on institutions, rules and habits, based on the assumptions of the Original and Evolutionary Institutionalism, for application in rural studies and to present empirical research experiences, in this theoretical line, of different institutions of Brazil.