Editors’ Introduction

Abstract

This volume includes selected chapters presented in the 5th International Conference “INSTITUTIONS & DEVELOPMENT” held in the new premises of the Department of Economics of the University of Thessaly in Volos, Greece, from May, 17th to 19th, 2017. The main objective of the Conference was to depict the role of both formal and informal institutions in achieving long-term economic efficiency and development. As both the recent global financial crisis and the subsequent sovereign debt crisis within the Eurozone have shown, sustainable development is a combination of human, social and institutional factors that interact with each other and go beyond the strictly economic conditions of each country. As put elsewhere, ‘Political Economy recognizes the fact that the performance of the economy depends only for a small part on nature factors, i.e. natural resources, and largely upon the institutional mechanisms that society chooses to use, as a matter of Policy, to motivate and to co-ordinate the participation of resources, in the social economy’ Vliamos (1992: 5). Economics is first and foremost a social science. Skidelsky (2016) reminds us of John Stuart Mill, the great nineteenth-century economist and philosopher, who ‘believed that nobody can be a good economist if he or she is just an economist. (…) What unites the great economists, and many other good ones, is a broad education and outlook. This gives them access to many different ways of understanding the economy.’