Institutional change, economic development, and the environment

There are no widely accepted models for specifying how economic and institutional variables are linked. In practice, the linkages between institutions and economic performance have differed by development level and by type of country. Nevertheless, there are some empirical generalizations which can be made. The first section of this paper describes the role of institutional change in economic development at the macro level. The second section illustrates how, in an African village, institutional change is used to shift the incidence of population-growth induced environmental degradation disproportionately onto the poor.