Bernard Maris and Institutional Economics: An Interlocution on Regional Transformation

Abstract

An admirer of John Maynard Keynes and an advocate of a historically grounded economic theory, the French economist, Bernard Maris, investigated the possible emergence of alternative monetary, productive, and distributive institutional arrangements for a more just society. Based on a dialogue between institutional economics and Bernard Maris, the present paper aims at proposing general guidelines for the construction of a plan for subnational development towards a more equitable and inclusive society on the regional, individual, and geo-economic levels. With a special focus on the region of Occitanie—Maris’s native region, located in the Southwest of France—the study borrows Karl Polanyi’s lens, in his The Great Transformation, to envision a possible reduction of dependency in each one of those three levels through the process of decommodification of money, labor, and land, respectively. Because of its ability to take into consideration specificities (being them departmental, territorial, and/or social), institutional economic theory seems adequate to support subnational development, especially in a region with great diversity and a high level of socio-economic and geographic disparity like Occitanie.

Keywords:

• institutional economics
• Bernard Maris
• full employment
• local currency
• ecological economics
• regional development

JEL Classification Codes:

• B52
• E12
• E15
• O33
• Q57
• R11

Notes

1 Southwestern France has experiment with a local currency between 2007 and 2012, the SOL. However, the experience was not successful, mainly because the SOL network had low autonomy from the euro and, more importantly, it imposed a fixed convertibility which limited the extension of the program and did not disconnect it from a store of value function (Blanc 2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Natalia Bracarense

Natalia Bracarense is at the SciencesPo Toulouse—LEREPS (France) and North Central College (Naperville, Illinois, USA).