Abstract
This chapter is a revised version of a keynote addressing an international gathering of scholars. It was convened to provoke a broad and sincere exchange on new dimensions of state activism as seen through sectoral and country experiences, basically anchored in empirical analyses. What we do in this framework paper is to take a step back and ask if there are new insights that may allow for broader generalizations at the level of economic theory. We attempt to be specific on how institutions matter for economic change. First, we show how institutions may assist change, hinder change or become hollowed and thus become largely irrelevant. Finally, as fourth we try to generalize what follows from all this for broader theory, joining in the renewed discussion on the developmental state paradigm.
Keynote to the 5th State in the Varieties of Capitalism conference series of the Institute for World Economy of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and CENS entitled Institutions and Change, Budapest, 28–29 November, 2019.
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Notes
- 1.
Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall/virtual special issue, edited and introduced by Michael Ellman/April, 2019—last retrieved from https://academic.oup.com/cje/pages/berlin_wall on 18 November 2019.
- 2.
This consideration had some political- though by no means professional—justification owing to fears of return of the Communists. Indeed, countries dodging privatization, primarily the new Independent States and countries of Southeast Europe have been faring much worse than their Central European fellow travelers, who privatized and liberalized faster.
- 3.
Cf. recently with much influence in Gordon (2016).
- 4.
For a recent ideological re-statement of this old claim from the early 1990s cf. Appel and Oreinstein (2018).
- 5.
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Csaba, L. (2021). Institutions and Change: New Horizons in Economic Theory. In: Gerőcs, T., Ricz, J. (eds) The Post-Crisis Developmental State . International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71987-6_2
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