Appearances are misleading: globalization suggests that the economy is everywhere, that it triumphs over states and undermines their sovereignty. But a new political economy, developed especially in the Anglo-Saxon countries and which this work intends to publicize in France, strongly supports the opposite: the economy can not be understood without the role of the institutions, that is to say , according to Douglass North, "the rules of the game of society or, more formally, the constraints conceived by man that shape human interactions."

These rules, derived from custom, religion, politics or law specific to each culture, determine the coordination and economic performance of societies. Greece in the years 2010 is over-indebted because it is struggling to collect taxes, to fix the cadastre, to get rid of clientelist practices which, for 150 years, have ruined public finances, parasitize the rule of law, discourage public opinion. Its fault is institutional. The common currency transmits it to the rest of Europe. Which is now confronted, in forms henceforth peaceful, with the institutional regulation of its States. In globalization, competition is now the focus of competition, as it shapes the competitiveness of territories.

Most of the pre-existing institutions of economic development, the new political economy of "social orders", reminds us that the way in which the differentiable profit of a certain action is valued depends above all on the social rules in force and the conditions of their application.