5th The Role of State in Varieties of Capitalism (SVOC) Institutions and Change
The SVOC2019 conference is organized by the Institute of World Economics of the Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Center for European Neighborhood Studies, Central European University.
World economy and politics underwent significant changes during the past three decades. The relatively stable times of the Great Moderation in world economy and bi-polar world politics are gone. The 2001 dotcom crisis and the 2007/8 financial crisis have signalled the start of a new era. Financialization of business, the emergence of mighty new competitors in the world economy and the devastating effects of the crises created big pressure on the institutions of the Western Hemisphere, the so called competition state (featured by the institutions of liberal market economy and political democracy). Many of the newly created (copied) institutions of the post-communist countries were marred by the soft social institutional heritage leading to inadequate performance. At the same time many emerging market economies suffered from repeated currency crises and economic slowdown, while others realized tremendous success in the period relying on very peculiar hybrid institutional settings. The main questions of the 5th SVOC conference address the challenges of the traditional institutions of the competition state and the future of the emerging new institutional solutions.
Traditional concepts on institutional change usually divide the topic and treat formal and informal institutions separately. While formal institutions can be altered rather quickly, their social embeddedness evolves and changes over a longer period of time. The main topic of the conference is the establishment and evolution of market economic institutions in various groups of countries after the collapse of the bipolar world political system, and especially after the 2008 crisis.
Our main expectation is that conventional economic institutions in emerging market economies became especially vulnerable since their social embeddedness could not reach the level of traditional, more developed market economies’ institutions. The evolution of new institutional setting in the age of hybridity is giving way to increased statism, such as economic patriotism, neo-mercantilism, increased collusion of the economy and politics. However, there is also pressure on the institutions of more developed countries that may exercise even stronger influence on world economic development.