VRIJE UNIVERSITEIT BRUSSEL
Faculty of Economic, Social and Political Sciences & Solvay Management School
You are cordially invited to attend the public defence of a thesis to obtain the title of
DOCTOR IN ECONOMIC SCIENCES by Bertin Martens
On Tuesday 14 September 2004 at 16.00h in block E room 0.06
VUB campus Brussels, Pleinlaan 2 - 1050 Brussels
Title of the doctoral thesis:
The cognitive mechanics of economic development and institutional change
Promoter: Prof. dr. M. Despontin (ESP)
Co-promoter: Prof. dr. F. Heylighen (CLEA)
Summary of the doctoral thesis
This research is situated in the domain of economic growth and development theory. It starts with a critique of existing economic growth theories and their problems to deal with the concept of "knowledge" in a coherent way. Knowledge is usually presented as a one-dimensional variable in these models. Composition and distribution of knowledge (specialisation) are rarely discussed.
Rather than taking the exchange of goods and services in markets as an exogenous starting point, this study starts from cognition, i.e. learning, storage and communication of knowledge. Based on the assumption that individual information processing capacity is limited, the study demonstrates that there exists an optimal allocation of individual knowledge between specialisation and variety. However, specialisation is not self-evident. It requires the presence of a communication medium to transfer the acquired specialised knowledge and one that satisfies a number of conditions: a partial transfer of knowledge should be sufficient to give access to the full package of knowledge, and the residual uncertainties that remain after transfer should be manageable. This research aims to demonstrate that transfer of knowledge via exchange of goods and services, i.e. economic systems, satisfies these conditions.
At the same time, this research focuses attention on economic institutions, including property rights and political institutions that define these rights. The quality of these institutions is measured on the basis of transaction costs (ex-ante costs to make a deal on a transaction) and residual uncertainty (potential ex-post costs, after the transaction has taken place). This research demonstrates that the quality of institutions is correlated with the extent of distribution of knowledge (or specialisation) in a society. Obstacles to institutional reforms slow down growth in knowledge and thereby economic growth. The conclusion of this study is that economic growth and development are not only determined by knowledge accumulation but also by the extent of knowledge distribution and the presence of appropriate economic and political institutions that facilitate this distribution.
Curriculum Vitae
Bertin Martens has a Licence Degree in Economic Science from the Catholic University of Louvain (1979). He worked as an economist for several United Nations agencies and for the European Commission, in developing countries and transition economies in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Central and Eastern Europe. His work focused mostly on development aid and the institutional aspects of economic development.
In the mid-1990s he returned to his academic interests in development economics, to confront his operational experience with economic theory. He wrote two books on development aid and several papers on the more theoretical aspects of economic growth theory.
This research began with contacts at the Centrum Leo Apostel (CLEA/VUB) and the Max Planck Institute for Economic Systems (Jena). The candidate carried out part of his research as a Fellow at the Mercatus Center, George Mason University, and the Institute for International Studies, Stanford University. He is a member of the International Society for New Institutional Economics.
