With Darcy Allen.
Abstract: Since the mid-twentieth century, development economists have identified barriers to economic growth including financing a savings-investment gap, planning investments, and making lasting institutional change. Efforts to overcome these development barriers range from centralised planned intervention to decentralised entrepreneurial search. In this paper we analyse the impact 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 permissionless, polycentric and institutionally sticky economic development process. Blockchains shift the entrepreneurial process by which development problems are defined and ameliorated through time.
Working paper available at SSRN.