The evolution of institutions and state governing public choice in the second half of twentieth-century Spain

Resum

The economic history of Spain during the second half of the XX Century represents a story of success. The key of this "Spanish economic miracle" resides in the process of institutional change of the country, which includes the making of markets with their key date of 1959, the political reform of democratisation between 1975 and 1978 and a general evolution towards the european institutional framework. From the theoretical approach of Douglass North Theory of the State (New Institutional Economics) and Avner Greif Theory of Institutional Change (Historical Institutional Analysis), this article analyses the institutional foundations of the Spanish economic development during the period 1950-2000, and exposes interesting lessons on the relationship between institutional change and economic development. In the northian work, the Spanish institutional framework and the existence of a predatory State appear as explaining factors of the economic failure of Spain for several Centuries. The Franco dictatorship constituted the last example of this predatory State, and implied a "self-destructing" institutional framework, according to the definition by Avner Greif. While in the first francoism of the forties the institutional formula combined a genuine predator with economic depression, the decade of the fifties meant an institutional adaptation provoked by a change in the set of possibilities, in the objectives and in the subjective model of the State. This process of change flowed into the making of a market economy that allowed a stage of strong growth and of change in the Spanish informal institutions during the sixties (corroborating the hypotheses of Yoram Barzel, Douglass North and Mancur Olson). It generated a new economy and a new society that, after the death of General Franco, constituted a contractual State in the northian sense, across a transitive and transactional political transition towards a new democratic situation that expanded the possibilities for cooperation and signified a "self-reinforcing" institutional framework.