State and Development: The Need for a Reappraisal of the Current Literature
指出制度经济学文献中常忽略的国家复杂性，探讨国家在发展中的多重角色，包括协调失败、集体行动、承诺与问责的权衡、国家能力构建及政治联盟形成等问题，对研究国家与发展关系的学者有参考价值。
This essay tries to bring out some of the complexities that are overlooked in the usual treatment of the state in the institutional economics literature and supplement the latter with a discussion of some alternative approaches to looking at the possible developmental role of the state. It refers to a broader range of development goals (including the structural transformation of the economy) and focuses on problems like the resolution of coordination failures and collective-action problems, the conflicting issues of commitment and accountability and the need for balancing the trade-offs they generate, some ingredients of state capacity and political coalition building usually missed in the literature, the possible importance of rent sharing in a political equilibrium, the advantages and problems of political centralization and decentralization, and the multidimensionality of state functions that may not be addressed by markets or private firms.