Статья. Представлена на The 9th Annual Conference of International Society for New Institutional Economics. Barcelona, 22-25 September, 2005.Empirical validation of the transaction cost concept proved to be a major intellectual endeavour
that has yielded only partial success. Particular difficulties have been encountered in the
measurement of such costs at the micro or macro level. The article of Wallis and North (1988) is
one attempt to provide a measure of transaction costs in the national economy. Their attempt is
to define transaction sectors and relate the levels of output (i.e. costs incurred) in such sectors
to the level of gross national / domestic product. Among these costs one finds:
a) costs of management, sales, administration and control,
b) costs of financing, insurance, distribution,
c) (some of the costs) of the public sector / the State.
Apart from the original research concerning the US, there have been very few studies describing
other economies (e.g. Australia, Argentina). The paper joins the discussion on macroeconomic
interpretation of transaction costs started by Wallis and North. While we had hoped to trace the
evolution of the transaction sectors as well as the pattern of transaction activities in nontransaction
sectors as defined above, the availability of data prevented us from accomplishing
ambitious research tasks. This paper is basically a replication of the study Wallis and North did
for the US and B. Dollery and Leong did for Australia albeit for a much shorter time span (seven
years). It contains a short description of the methodology used by these authors, the application
of the method to the data on the Polish economy in the 1990s and 2000s. We compare the
findings with Wallis and North, Dollery and Leong and provide some preliminary interpretation
of the results. Basically, our findings are remarkably close to the estimates of both these teams.
The paper ends with remarks on the merits of this approach within neo-institutional economics
with some implications for the understanding of economic growth.
