THE DISTRIBUTIONAL IMPACTS OF INSTITUTIONAL REFORMS

Resumen

The aim here is two-fold. First, the author intends to show that the statement that the new institutionalists pay no attention to aspects of distribution can be refuted. To do that, he examines works by outstanding authors from this analytical tradition. In the second place, the article tackles the review and broadening of a very well-known, orthodox graphic toolkit to carry out a very persuasive systematic analysis of the main ways that institutional reform impacts distribution and influences the total volume of transaction costs for the participants in each institutional sphere. This analysis also makes it possible to underline that the rules that certain agents perceive as causes of the transaction costs they pay are viewed by others as the mechanisms that allow them to finally obtain better distributional results, at least in the short run, even if they have to pay the habitual transaction costs associated with any negotiation. Although these ideas are certainly foreign to the investigative process of many new institutionalists, this is not the case of others such as North, Eggertsson, Libecap, Ostrom, and even Williamson and Ménard. Obviously, this dimension of distribution is often of great concern for researchers who work in the framework of other currents of analysis, but the aim of this article is not to examine these other contributions, but to show that these aspects are gaining more and more ground in the framework of the new institutional economics.