La « contre-performance » de l'Europe continentale. Le lien entre institutions, dynamisme et prospérité économique

While most continental European economies have exhibit deceiving outcomes for two decades, it seems necessary ? and it reveals fruitful ? to elaborate an « institutional hypothesis » to understand this failure. Our central reasoning is the following : it is in the absence or the muffling of economic institutions able to generate « dynamism » that one must search for the explanation of the economic underperformance in continental Europe. After having carefully defined the idea of « economic performance » and the concept of « dynamism », we study in details the respective institutional advantages of the capitalist and corporatist systems, drawing on a number of theoretical approaches aimed at best identifying their strengths and weaknesses regarding the crucial issue of innovation process. Finally, we propose a first series of empirical tests for our theoretical intuition, that, while only preliminary, prove positive. JEL Codes  : N23, N24, N13, N14, 031, 033, P17, P51.