Conocimiento e instituciones: una revisión crí­tica de la teorí­a económica estándar

Abstract

Knowledge, as an economic resource, has particular characteristics such as difficulties of appropriation. For that reason, it is not possible to understand the knowledge production in the institutional frame of market exchanges. This implies a problem to the standard economic theory, which recognize the role of knowledge in the wealth production process, but identifies the market as the principal mechanism of economic coordination.

Consequently, to the standard economic theory, knowledge is an institutional issue.

This paper aims to construct a review of alternative solutions proposed by the standard economic theory to the problem of knowledge. Three approaches are presented: the external effects notion by Arthur Pigou, the property rights by Ronald Coase, and finally, the mechanism of governance by Oliver Williamson.

This review allows us to show that the standard economic theory results, inevitably, in an ad hoc or exogenous conception of non-market institutions. Knowledge is treated as an external problem, opposed to the approach’s fundamentals.

Finally, the paper proposes an alternative solution to the institutional problem of knowledge production. This solution, that we called “socioeconomic”, is based in the Karl Polanyi’s substantive approach and contradicts the idea that markets are the “natural” form of economic organization. In this approach, the knowledge problem is analyzed as a problem of interaction between the different mechanisms of economic integration: exchange, redistribution and reciprocity.