The dynamics of informality and its implications for a new economic political order.

Summary This thesis explores the dynamics of informal institutions in national and global governance and the adjustment of the political-economic order, in a country in transition and globally in the context of the international financial crisis, using the comparative institutional approach. It adopts a New Institutional Economics (NIE) perspective to study how different forms of governance, including informal governance mechanisms, emerge and function under different circumstances. Chapter Two provides evidence of the predominance of accommodative and competitive relationships between formally and informally decentralized systems of public service delivery and law and order in sixty-four Vietnamese provinces. Our analysis of "informality" in Chapter Three supports the argument that formal mechanisms are not sufficient to induce public actors to assume full responsibility, but must be accompanied by informal ones to fill in the accountability gaps of the formal system. The empirical analysis of forty-five developed and developing countries in chapter four finds that institutional non-congruence, in general, has a complementary effect on the size of the informal economy, but acts as a substitute in countries that have low levels of non-congruence, good governance of corruption, or high proactivity in taking initiatives to reduce the perceived legitimacy gap of informal economic activities.