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Top1. Introduction
The objective of this paper is to contribute to sustainable development literature by extending the investigation on more diversified public and private institutional elements and the links between them and a broader spectrum of inclusive and sustainable development structures. Specially, it is to earliest test whether (and thus how far) the World Economic Forum (WEF)’s latest expanded variables for institutions—initially measured and designated as competitiveness and growth-induced rudiments (World Economic Forum, 2015, p.35, pp.44-46)—do link to inclusive and sustainable development features. This research is hence in the context of the momentous United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, a milestone for nations and international organizations to continue working on inclusive and sustainable development as set for by the United Nations’ 17 sustainable development goals (United Nations, 2015). To solve world poverty, inequality and environmental sustainability problems, international organizations have before proposed diverse policies and pathways. Among them those emphasizing the combination of growth, inclusiveness and sustainability as an optimum outcome are European Commission (2010), OECD (2014A), UNCTAD (2014) and UNDP (2017). Following them, this paper defines inclusive and sustainable development to embrace sustained economic growth and employment, sustained levels of intergeneration savings and debts, and reductions in poverty, inequality, natural resource depletion and pollution. This conception is then broader than a narrow notion of ‘inclusive growth’ thrusted for by some academics’, World Bank’s and International Monetary Fund’s studies and agenda (e.g. Dollar & Kraay, 2002; Commission on Growth and Development, 2008; Berg & Ostry, 2011; World Bank/IMF, 2015) that have focused mainly on the role of economic growth in generating labour-based productive employment and reducing poverty and inequality.
In the second and third sections, the study thus explicates concepts pertaining to the effects of institutions on the broader inclusive and sustainable development. Institutions here are defined by assemblages of institutional economics and social-ecology system literature as systems of established and embedded social rules that structure/shape social interactions within a wide variety of repetitive and structured socio-eco-economic situations (North, 1990; Ostrom, 2005; Hodgson, 2006). In the literature reviewed below, however, institutional elements share the qualities of governance elements. This is given that governance is defined as the purposeful effort to steer and manage socio-ecology systems in certain ways (Koimann, 1993; Vatn, 2018). Such purposeful efforts are propelled by different kinds of actors and institutional structures that define the actors and facilitate their interactions (Vatn, 2018). Governance prominently includes aspects of institutional elements on top of other elements such as leadership and resources (Koontz et al., 2015). Given institutions both dictate the functions of the state and govern those of private entities, no rigid distinction can be drawn between the governance and institutional factors (United Nations, 2000, chap. VIII; United Nations, 2006, p.126). Accordingly, we begin the second section with reviewing the relationships between property rights and economic growth, poverty and inequality, as originally explored by some development studies published under study and report series of the core international development organizations including United Nations, UNCTAD and World Bank (e.g. United Nations, 2006; Acemoglu & Robinson, 2008; Basu, 2008; Basu & Das, 2010). In the third section where the core areas of the research are extended, the links between property rights and their specific category, intellectual property rights, and broader inclusive and sustainable components are copiously reviewed and hypothesized. Furthermore, we extensively review and make general hypotheses on the relationships between the added institutional social ecology, comprising rule of law, accountability, ethics and corruption control, and efficiency elements, and the broader inclusive and sustainable structures.