On December 11, 2024, from 19:00 to 21:00, the academic lecture "Why Institutions Matter: A Review of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics" was successfully held at the Institute for International and Area Studies (IIAS) of Tsinghua University. The lecture was delivered by Professor Wang Yong, the director of the Digital Economy Research Center at the School of Social Sciences, Tsinghua University, and chaired by Assistant Researcher Yang Chongsheng from IIAS. Around 110 people attended the lecture, including researchers and doctoral students from IIAS, as well as scholars and students from domestic and foreign universities.
During the lecture, Professor Wang Yong first introduced the main achievements and viewpoints of the 2024 Nobel laureates in Economics, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson. Their research indicates that institutions are crucial in understanding the development disparities among different countries and regions. Through the study of colonies, they discovered that the institutions established by colonizers in different regions differed markedly. For instance, inclusive institutions can propel regional development, while extractive institutions may lead to poverty. Taking Nogales, Arizona in the United States and Nogales, Sonora in Mexico as an example, despite the identical geographical conditions, different institutions have given rise to very different development outcomes.
In the second part of the lecture, Professor Wang Yong reviewed the institutional economic theory in terms of institutionalism, the significance of institutions, institutional evaluation, and institutional change. In the context of institutionalism, he introduced different schools of thought and the viewpoints of representative figures, such as the old institutional school, the post-institutional school, and the new institutional school, and discussed the definition, functions, and changes of institutions. He also pointed out the relevant indicators for institutional evaluation and that institutional change is influenced by multiple factors.
At the conclusion of the lecture, Professor Wang Yong analyzed the implications of the Nobel Prize in Economics for China's institutional reform. He noted that to deepen the economic system reform, we should not only focus on the incentive function of institutions but also their commitment function, and fully utilize the inclusive and beneficial functions of institutions.
During the Q&A session after the lecture, the participants actively posed questions regarding the criteria for evaluating good and bad institutions and the distinction between explicit and implicit institutions. Professor Wang Yong provided detailed responses.
Wang Yong: A tenured professor and doctoral supervisor at Tsinghua University, the principal investigator of a major project of the National Social Science Fund of China. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Guanghua School of Management, Peking University, was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Economics at Harvard University, and a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford funded by Santander. His main research fields encompass digital economy and platform economy, enterprise theory, and state-owned enterprise reform.
