Institutional Change in Transition: An Evolving Research Agenda

The intertwined process of economic and political liberalisation in Central and Eastern Europe, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, has represented a unique opportunity to test, and improve on, our understanding of the origins of prosperity and the drivers of institutional change. In this chapter, we discuss what has been learned, and the open questions that remain, after thirty years of research on institutional change in transition. We summarise the lessons in three chronological steps: the natural experiment stage, the sequencing of reforms stage and finally the cultural legacies stage. We conclude on the need to explore further the formation of individual values and beliefs, explicitly recognising the importance of their social context.