Institutional Bypasses: A Strategy to Promote Reforms for Development

Institutional bypass is a reform strategy that creates alternative institutional regimes to give citizens a choice of service provider and create a form of competition between the dominant institution and the institutional bypass. While novel in the academic literature, the concept captures practices already being used in developing countries. In this illuminating book, Mariana Mota Prado and Michael J. Trebilcock explore the strengths and limits of this strategy with detailed case studies, showing how citizen preferences provide a benchmark against which future reform initiatives can be evaluated, and in this way change the dynamics of the reform process. While not a 'silver bullet' to the challenge of institutional reform, institutional bypasses add to the portfolio of strategies to promote development. This work should be read by development researchers, scholars, policymakers, and anyone else seeking options on how to promote change and implement reforms in developing countries around the world.

Mariana Mota Prado has published extensively on law and development, including two co-authored books with Michael J. Trebilcock: What Makes Poor Countries Poor? Institutional Determinants of Development (2013) and Advanced Introduction to Law and Development (2014). She has taught at the Centre for Transnational Legal Studies in London, the Fundação Getúlio Vargas Rio de Janeiro Law School, Brazil, Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México Law School, Los Andes Law School in Colombia, and the University of Puerto Rico School of Law.

Michael J. Trebilcock has published on many subjects related to institutional reforms and development and has won multiple awards for his work, including the Owen Prize for The Common Law of Restraint of Trade. He has also authored The Limits of Freedom of Contract (1994) and Dealing with Losers: The Political Economy of Policy Transitions (2014, winner of the Donner Prize) and co-authored Rule of Law Reform and Development: Charting the Fragile Path of Progress (2008).