ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the research programme 'Agency, Gender, and Economic Development in the World Economy 1850–2000' that was carried out at Utrecht University and Radboud University Nijmegen between 2011 and 2015. It explores how 'agency', conceptualized as the ability to define one's goals and act upon them, has contributed to long-term global economic development. Sen's approach has a strong normative dimension: 'development as freedom', for example, is a statement as much about how people should see 'development' as about what development 'is'. This is much less explicit in NIE, which presents itself as an 'objective' theory of the determinants of economic development, focusing on the institutions – the 'rules of the game' – of societies. At the conceptual and theoretical level people connect two academic traditions in economics – New Institutional Economics and Sen's work on agency and the capabilities approach – that have so far been relatively 'isolated' from each other.
