¿Por qué las reformas del Estado fracasan? Un enfoque de costos de transacción

Most recent attempts by developing countries to achieve economic growth at sustainable rates have placed special emphasis on institutional aspects. In particular, the so-called “Fujimori revolution” developed an interesting economic reform program with an important institutional component. The initial results of this program were praised by some scholars as a case study for a successful economic reform program. However, after a booming privatization program, and the set-up of severa1 market-friendly institutions, the question is why the ultimate reform was not carried out: the reform of the state. The fact that most of the proposals for reforming the state have lacked the support of any meaningful methodological approach partly explains why successful reforms of the state are scarce worldwide. The implicit assumption in most of those proposals has been that private and public organizations work in similar fashion, and therefore, adopting similar institutions will render similar results for both sectors. However, the results have been deeply disappointing. As North (1990a, l990b and 1993) contended that institutions, organizations, and their interactions are the primary source of institutional change, our study develop a methodology to fix the existing bridge between the design of reform of the governance structure and the assumptions behind it. As a result, we develop a framework to explain how organizational changes in political organizations, such as the Executive Office, as well as in the political institutions sustaining a particular political market, are required in order to sustain any exogenous economic institutional change. Our study argues that permanent effects may be derived from exogenous institutional change as long as there is credible change in the governance of public organizations.