According to this year's Nobel Prize winners in economics, what factors influence global growth? What is the human element in economics? And what is institutional economics? The 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics is commented on by prof. dr hab. Jacek Zaucha of the Faculty of Economics.

This year's Alfred Nobel Prize from the Bank of Sweden was awarded to institutional economists Daron Acemoğlu, Simon Johnson, and James Alani Robinson for their research on how institutions are created and how they affect welfare. This is the seventh prize of this stature for institutional economists, albeit after a long hiatus of 16 years. I received the news of the award with great satisfaction and delight. Institutional economics offers a different perspective on the analysis of growth and development processes compared to classical economics. What matters is not only access to capital, including human and physical capital, the number, scale and scope of innovations or the level of savings but also the institutional fabric, understood as the formal and informal social rules of the game, norms and principles adopted and shaping interactions in a given social group and the ways of enforcing them. Its importance can be seen with the naked eye, even without empirical research. People live better in a society where trust prevails, counterparties fulfil their obligations and democratic principles are respected. This does not imply the superiority of institutional economics over other schools of economics. Various accusations are levelled at the research of the prize winners, e.g. that the faster development of some regions of the world relative to others cannot be fully explained on the basis of their analyses. For me, however, the institutional perspective is very important, as it introduces a human element into scientific discourse, and economics, in sum, is a social science, so economic change, especially long-term change, cannot be understood without a normative reflection on values, principles, social goals and ambitions. One would like to paraphrase the famous saying ‘Man, stupid’.

The research of the prize winners will probably not affect the fate of the world. If it did, the countries of sub-Saharan Africa would have long since achieved stable growth prospects. Contemporary political processes, unfortunately, resort to polarisation, building antagonisms, and destroying institutions, as long as it offers short-term benefits. And this is why institutional economics is needed as a kind of voice of conscience, even if only as a cry in the wilderness. This role is well served by Acemoğlu, who warns of changes in political elites in Washington causing increased uncertainty and instability on a global scale. So it is worth wishing for all of us to appreciate the importance and role of institutions in long-term development, to try, at least here in Europe, to return to institutions that have worked, such as solidarity, political honesty, and sharing the benefits of technological development. It is worth refreshing the theory of public choice, of which the institutional economist James McGill Buchanan was also a co-author, so as to prevent the erosion of institutions by economic processes or political mechanisms, and above all, by voluntarism.