L'Assetto Istituzionale: tra teoria e storia

The essay explores - through an original approach that intertwines theoretical and historical analysis, with a style similar to many works of Alberto Quadrio Curzio – the complex relations institutions and the functioning of economic systems. In doing so, the author dwells on income distribution in economic systems where, of their size (and of consequent increase of complexity the economic interactions that exist within them), the separation between consumption and production decisions has become radical. The considers the development/underdevelopment dilemma as a possible consequence of a strained acceleration in economic and technological changes of economic systems to which institutions have not adjusted, and of the relevance, in national income, of exploiting non-produced natural resources. A temporal separation of production and consumption decisions, that is separating decisions for saving from investment and how economic equilibrium can be modified with the introduction money, is considered in the last section of the paper. The relation of the latter with mining and the transformation of precious metal, first of all gold, already extensively examined by Alberto Quadrio Curzio since the beginning of the 1980s, is also discussed