Capitalism from Outside?: Economic Cultures in Eastern Europe after 1989

The Sinuous Path of New Institutional Economics in Bulgaria

The Sinuous Path of New Institutional Economics in Bulgaria Roumen Avramov Mapping the Field Until 1989, New Institutional Economics (NIE) was a paradigm almost completely ignored by the social sciences in Bulgaria. It was occasionally mentioned in papers on the history of economic thought. A scrupulous bibliography would maybe detect some remote reference in the texts of sociologists or philosophers. The research community was a bit more familiar with the “old” institutionalist school (namely, with its economic dimension), which had entered Marxist textbooks through a dogmatic interpretation in the traditional “critique of bourgeois economic ideas.” Some of the classics (like Veblen) were accessible in Russian translation, while libraries owned unsystematic collections of texts from the first half of the twentieth century. None of those relics, however, had any significant incidence in the agenda of economic research. Institutionalism provoked, at most, a certain curiosity or provided subjects for doctoral theses. Economic policy was based on totally different premises; the political economy of reforms—although a perfect institutionalist case—was never approached in institutionalist terms; and applied studies were oriented towards more visible issues. With the onset of the post-communist transformation and—eventually —with the voicing of doubts about the Washington Consensus, NIE started to acquire a certain notoriety in Bulgaria. This development ran parallel to the consolidation of the school worldwide, marked symbolically by the Nobel Prize received by Coase (1991) and North (1993) and by the establishment of the International Society for New Institutional Economics (1997). Currently, NIE-type thinking is present in various forms in Bulgaria. The first layer is made up by a small number of academic publications explicitly devoted to New Institutionalism (NI) or overtly sharing its principles. This is complemented by a larger set of texts dealing with topics cultivated by NIE: although the studies do not always refer 1 The majority of those papers are from Bulgarian scholarly journals: Ikonomicheska misal [Economic thought] and its supplement Ikonomicheski izsledvania [Economic studies]; Soziologicheski problemi [Sociological problems ]. Forty-seven NIE-related titles from those journals (2.8 percent of the total) are identified among more than 1,600 papers published in Ikonomicheska misal (1991–2009), Ikonomicheski izsledvania (1996–2009), and Soziologicheski problemi (2000–2009). 2 Six NIE-related doctoral theses out of 96 in the field of economic theory, history of economic thought, and sociology were defended in 1994–2009. 224 Roumen Avramov directly to this school, the prominence of those topics is (at least partly) attributable to their long-lasting exploration by institutionalist authors. The main fields are ownership/privatization; informal economy; corporate governance; social capital; political economy; economic culture ; entrepreneurship; values; regulatory policies; and transaction costs.1 There is no systematic record of Bulgarian authors’ publications abroad, but it could be assumed that Bulgarian researchers publishing in international journals follow the general pattern of distribution among different intellectual currents. Concerning doctoral theses, NIE is almost missing.2 Finally, a few relevant books (about 15 titles during the last decade) deal with informal economy, entrepreneurship, and corruption. The only translations of NIE classics are North’s Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (1990; translated into Bulgarian in 2000) and two papers by North and Williamson. A more promising trend seems to be the emergence of a second layer of reception: NGOs (or even business consultants) proved to manifest a clear preference for selected NIE topics. These organizations and experts fill a number of niches and seek out access to broader media coverage. Far from being “canonical” institutionalists, they produce outlooks, surveys, and analyses that are at least partly influenced by NIE principles or gather rough materials and data relevant to the paradigm. In a few cases NI is conceptually interiorized, but even when implicitly transmitted, these studies promote a NIE-like point of view. Their public impact is greater than that of academic publications. The last hypostasis of NIE is recognizable in a few university courses devoted to this school of thought. Only one of them (Georgy Ganev, Economic Department, Sofia University) proposes a fully articulated curriculum. It introduces NI in the context of neoclassical economics, makes an overview of economic history, brings in the key concepts of The Sinuous Path of New Institutional Economics in Bulgaria 225 transactions costs, institutions, mental learning/models, and comprehensively discusses North’s model of institutional change. A special portion is dedicated to the institutional analysis of Bulgaria’s economic transition. The other course (Ninel Kiosseva, New Bulgarian...