Meso-institutions in the International Practice of Industry Development

Abstract

The task of increasing the effectiveness of economic policy and identifying the reasons for the success or failure of reforms, in particular in the field of sectoral regulation, remains topical both for practitioners – developers of new laws and for researchers. Canadian economist Claude Menard and a number of other followers of the new institutional economics are looking for a solution to this problem within the framework of meso-institutions – an intermediate link between the institutional environment (macro-institutions) and institutional agreements (micro-institutions). The concept of meso-institutions is not well-established, and even in the works of Claude Menard himself, it is evolving. The purpose of the article is to identify the specifics of the mesoinstitutional level of analysis based on a review of studies on the factors of sustainable functioning and regulatory reforms in the international practice of industry development. A generalized definition of meso-institutions is formulated as following: meso-institutions are a set of mechanisms (regulatory rules) and tools/devices (organizations, such as a regulatory agency) that define the field of possible and permitted transactions between economic agents within the framework of general macro-rules, that ensure the performance of the functions of structuring relations, specifying and adapting rules, monitoring, as well as ensuring their execution. In addition, two directions of practical application of this theoretical development were identified: analysis of the causes of reform failures, and determination of the advantages and disadvantages of comparative institutional alternatives for interaction between business and the state in the sphere of regulation of industries. The comparative effectiveness of alternative meso-institutions depends on the conditions of the institutional environment, consisting of both formal and informal norms, on the structure of the industry, the forms of institutional agreements prevailing in it, and other factors.

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