Institutions and Economic Development: East and Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Summary The importance of institutions in the process of economic development has been emphasized for over a century by Schmoller, Veblen and Commons. Since the beginning of the 1980s, there has been a resurgence of institutionalist currents in the face of the difficulty of the neoclassical current in explaining the failure of development policies drawn from its theoretical corpus. It is in this context that the New Institutional Economics analyses appeared, seeking to include in economic policy recommendations variables that do not belong entirely to economics, such as political institutions (elections, constitution, democracy...). This thesis starts from the observation that Africa and South-East and East Asia had almost the same level of economic development in 1960. It then sets itself a triple objective: to understand the analyses and concepts of institutional economics, to study, with the help of an institutional comparison, the reasons why Asian countries have experienced economic development while African countries have sunk into underdevelopment? Finally, with the help of statistical and econometric methods, verify the links between institutions and economic development. We hypothesize that institutions are key factors in economic development. Three central questions underlie the different chapters of our work. These are: understanding how institutional analysis came into being, defining the notion of "institution" and its derivative concepts, how institutional change takes place, and understanding the theoretical scope of the institutional economics toolkit. Answers to these questions presuppose knowledge and mastery of the major currents of institutional economics, from Veblen, Schmoller and Commons to North, Williamson, Greif and Rodrik.