14 - Conclusions

Summary

The book shows that institutional changes have a large endogenous element in the form of strong but fuzzy underlying transitions. This is illustrated by a tale of three countries with a different culture and history that have converged to become much the same. However, the endogeneity means that we are explaining development by development, which gives a very confluent process. It is argued that exogeneity enters through arbitrary triggering events, which creates the large-scale fuzziness we observe, even when the underlying endogeneity leads to much the same transitions in the end.