Blockchain Technology and the Theory of Economic Development

25 Pages Posted: 4 Mar 2019 Last revised: 4 Feb 2020

See all articles by Darcy W E Allen

Darcy W E Allen

Royal Melbourne Institute of Technolog (RMIT University)

Chris Berg

Royal Melbourne Institute of Technolog (RMIT University)

Jason Potts

Royal Melbourne Institute of Technolog (RMIT University)

Date Written: February 13, 2019

Abstract

Since the mid-twentieth century, development economists have identified barriers to economic growth including financing a savings-investment gap, planning investments, and institutional change. Efforts to overcome these development barriers range from centralised planned intervention to decentralised entrepreneurial search. In this paper we use comparative institutional economics to analyse the expected impact of adoption of blockchain technologies on economic development. We propose that blockchains facilitate a more decentralised entrepreneurial process of economic development through institutional layering. This dynamic leads to a more market-based, polycentric and institutionally experimental economic development process. In this way blockchains shift the entrepreneurial process by which development problems are defined and ameliorated through time.

Keywords: Cryptoeconomics, New Development Economics, Institutional Economics, Institutional Entrepreneurship

Suggested Citation

Allen, Darcy W E and Berg, Chris and Potts, Jason, Blockchain Technology and the Theory of Economic Development (February 13, 2019). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3333568 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3333568

Darcy W E Allen (Contact Author)

Royal Melbourne Institute of Technolog (RMIT University) ( email )

Melbourne, 3000
Australia

Chris Berg

Royal Melbourne Institute of Technolog (RMIT University) ( email )

124 La Trobe Street
Melbourne, 3000
Australia

Jason Potts

Royal Melbourne Institute of Technolog (RMIT University) ( email )

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