The New Institutional Economics, led by four Nobel laureates (Ronald Coase, Douglass North, Oliver Williamson and Elinor Ostrom), has showed that institutions and organizations are a medium for reducing transaction costs and obtaining a higher efficiency in economic performance. This paper goes into the research program of the New Institutional Economics to explain the relevance of transaction costs in political exchange and organization and show that transactions costs are even higher in political markets than in economic markets. The paper reviews the main contributions on institutions, transaction costs and political governance, and provides some lessons on political transacting and governance. The survey includes the most detailed catalogue of political transaction costs that has ever been published.

Political trust has been considered a necessary condition for good democratic and economic performance over time. The grave economic crisis that started in 2008, which is known as the Great Recession, has deteriorated the level of political trust in several countries. Some authors have shown that those countries with an increasing level of unemployment experienced a sharp decline in political trust. In particular, the political distrust in Spain has suffered a high increase since the Great Recession. This paper tests the procyclicality of political trust in Spain through the analysis and modeling of the relationship between political trust and business cycle in Spain over the period 1996-2015. The cross-correlation analysis, the Granger causality test, and the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach coherently conclude the procyclicality of political trust in Spain. The unemployment rate shows a negative and statistically significant influence on political trust four quarters later.

Este artículo aborda una experiencia innovadora en la docencia de Economía Aplicada basada en el trabajo cooperativo del alumnado y en la elaboración participativa de contenidos, llevada a cabo en la docencia de Estructura Económica Internacional y de Economía del Sector Público por el Departamento de Economía Aplicada de la Universidad de Vigo. El sistema docente combina la docencia magistral del profesorado con un conjunto de prácticas y actividades dirigidas en las que se desarrollan las competencias de los alumnos, y que incluyen la realización de trabajo cooperativo. Este trabajo cooperativo realizado en grupos de alumnos se incorpora a los contenidos generales del curso, siendo objeto de evaluación. Esta actividad implica que el alumnado desarrolla un papel activo y protagonista en la configuración del curso y que los alumnos desarrollan sus competencias a través del trabajo cooperativo y de la elaboración participativa de contenidos. Esta forma de elaborar contenidos es la principal innovación educativa de este análisis de caso.

World economy is living a time of change, and the complexity of change has implied a new research agenda on the role of economic policy in society. The role, types and effects of economic policy have been major issues in economic science since its origins. Jean Tinbergen (1956) [1] established the basis for the traditional theory of economic policy in economics and he tried to show how economic knowledge could be organized to regulate and guide economic systems. Nevertheless, this traditional approach has been improved through several contributions, for example when Eggertsson (1997) [2] incorporated the existence of incomplete knowledge, endogenous politics and institutional change in the theory of economic policy.