Desarrollo económico: marco evolutivo e institucional

Understanding the processes of economic development of societies first implies understanding their evolutionary processes, and even those of nature as a whole. It is thus possible to glimpse a unity between man and society and even between man and nature. Such a unity lies under the so-called laws of complexity or, even closer to us, if we limit ourselves to the relationship between man and society, closer to the evolutionary laws which are firmly based on biology, but which are of suggestive application in economy. Knowledge and its materialisation, either in institutions or in technology, is revealed to us as the indispensable vehicle in the search of optimisation in the unavoidable process of change in all organisations. It will finally be in the acceptance of new individual mental models, and by aggregation, in the mental models we all share, where the evolutionary capacity of society is to be found. The greater contribution that public policies can make will be to allow that the two key variables of development (technology and institutions) follow their own evolution processes at the same pace as the level of knowledge acquired by the population. Experience teaches us that the development is possible even if it is not easy or rapid.