The chapter focuses on the crisis in the countries of eastern Europe, starting with the ‘transition’ to capitalism at the end of the 1980s. The concept of ‘core and periphery’ played an important role in the building of the EU. What were the consequences of EU-membership for the...

Regionalization is a contradictory process meaning both subnational fragmentation of territorial states and their supranational integration at a larger scale. In this paper federalism, as a division of sovereignty between several orders of government within the same political system, is...

This paper presents composite indicators of the institutional and policy characteristics of educational systems, collated from the questionnaire responses of 26 Member countries. These indicators provide an overview of the institutional framework in the primary and secondary education sector and...

Our aim is to merge the traditional literature on the determinant of success of special interests with the new political economy of international union. We create a political economy model of allocation of public spending among different interests. We apply it to an environment of International...

This paper presents a new methodology aimed at building institutional indicators. Up to now, all the available indicators have relied on an analysis of the supply of legal protection. Conversely we propose here a methodology based on the analysis of the demand for legal protection, as it is...

This paper surveys alternative approaches to the emergence and evolution of institutions. The challenge is to develop frameworks capable of capturing both stability and change. We follow a “descaling” approach to show how founding assumptions about economics—namely, alternative assumptions...

This paper proposes an analysis of the emergence and evolution of institutional frameworks. It explains the causes, process, and outcome of institutional evolution. We first describe the institutional framework as a multilevel system at the bottom of which several “local and flexible”...