Are Institutions Able to Adapt ?

Market economies cannot be reduced to the adjustments carried out by markets. They are also characterised by institutions covering the legal regulations applying to the players, the interactions between public policies and the rules of competition, ideologies, incentive schemes, and the social regulation standards that account for the diversity of capitalisms. This covers the labour contract, fair competition conditions, governance of the educational system, macroeconomic policy standards, the monetary regime and companies’ financing structures. But these institutions are not rigid. They change in response to their endogenous obsolescence. They also adapt to various types of exogenous shocks (political choices, the dynamic of ideologies, technological revolutions, democratic transitions, globalisation, etc.). Sometimes they resist and raise obstacles to the world’s metamorphoses in a national economy, in a sector of activity or for a category of players.

This session aims to explore the dynamic of institutions, the role they play in the transformation of economies, the rate at which they are able to change, and the factors that foster or inhibit their adaptation.