Where do markets come from and what drives their evolution? How do organizations cope with the competitive dynamism of markets? What is the role of governance mechanisms in the institutional coordination of markets? In this book, leading social scientists consider these questions and examine the institutional foundations of economic change.

This report addresses the overarching question regarding the role of institutions in enhancing market development following market reforms. It uses the New Institutional Economics framework to empirically analyze the role of a specific market institution, that of brokers acting as intermediaries to match traders in the Ethiopian grain market in reducing the transaction costs of search faced by traders. Brokers play a key role in facilitating exchange in a weak marketing environment where limited public market information, the lack of grain standardization, oral contracts, and weak legal enforcement of contracts increase the risk of contract failure. Relying on primary data, it analyzes traders' microeconomic behavior, social capital, the nature and extent of their transaction costs, and the norms and rules governing the relationship between brokers and traders.The study uses an innovative approach to quantify the costs of search and demonstrates that the brokerage institution is economically efficient both for individual traders and for global economic welfare.

Editors David Macey, William Pyle, and Stephen Wegren, with a host of world-leading agrarian analyst and practitioners, unravel the shortcomings surrounding post-communist agrarian reform and answers how and why particular policies were adopted in Eurasia. Building Market Institutions in Post-Communist Agriculture draws on country-level case studies to analyze a range of initiatives that institutions have applied to agricultural economies. In this edited collection, contributors use a comparative analytical framework to project a universal process of agrarian transformation that continues to change the social, economic, and political characteristics of this part of the world.

An analysis of recent data on the economic behavior of market institutions in sub-Saharan Africa, with implications for future research and current policy. In Market Institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa, Marcel Fafchamps synthesizes the results of recent surveys of indigenous market institutions in twelve countries, including Benin, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, and Zimbabwe, and presents findings about economics exchange in Africa that have implications both for future research and current policy. Employing empirical data as well as theoretical models that clarify the data, Fafchamps takes as his unifying principle the difficulties of contract enforcement. Arguing that in an unpredictable world contracts are not always likely to be respected, he shows that contract agreements in sub-Saharan Africa are affected by the absence of large hierarchies (both corporate and governmental) and as a result must depend to a greater degree than in more developed economies on social networks and personal trust. Fafchamps considers policy recommendations as they apply to countries in three different stages of development: countries with undeveloped market institutions, like Ghana; countries at an intermediate stage, like Kenya; and countries with developed market institutions, like Zimbabwe. Market Institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa caps ten years of personal research by the author. Fafchamps, in collaboration with such institutions as the Africa Division of the World Bank and the International Food Policy Research Institute, participated in the surveys of manufacturing firms and agricultural traders that provide the empirical basis for the book. The result is a work that makes a significant contribution to research on the continuing economic stagnation of many countries in sub-Saharan Africa and is also largely accessible to researchers in other fields and policy professionals.

This book is a timely reminder of the more fundamental determinants of capital accumulation and innovation. It provides a mixture of conceptual, empirical, historical and methodological approaches to the relationship between institutions, institutional change and economic development.

The outcome of three years of research on the role of institutions in labor markets at the research unit Labor Market Policy and Employment of the Social Science Research Center Berlin, these seven contributions were originally presented at a conference in December 1992 before a group of experts i

"Financial Markets and Institutions in India" by T.M. Joshi is a comprehensive reference book offering insights into India's financial landscape, regulations, and market operations.