The article is devoted to the problem of import of institutions, which is manifested in the form of society’s borrowing of traditions, customs, and norms of behavior that developed in a different institutional environment. Such import is quite often accompanied by atrophy, regeneration of institutions and dysfunction of institutional macrostructure. Emerging so-called institutional traps cause serious risks for development of recipient countries. A historical example of the implementation of such risks was an attempt to transplant institutions of orthodox or radical liberalism in post-Soviet countries which expected modernization of their economies but received a diametrically opposite result – the primitivization of structures. An alternative to this course of events could be the usage of social market economy institutions (SME). Since the essence of the SME concept is a combination of market self-regulation mechanisms with a systematic state interventionism, it was possible to carry out a systemic transformation with, first, lower social costs and, second, without total deindustrialization. There is an existing need for a broader perspective on the formation of market equilibrium, which implies the inclusion in a number of independent market entities of the state that seeks to maximize its own function of social utility. It is the only approach that ensures the optimization of modern society’s institutional environment in general and criteria for selecting imported institutions in particular. The novelty of the work is the justification of considering the interdependence of an exporting country’s institutions, while choosing the most efficient one, and the need to assess consequences of its implementation in a recipient state’s institutional environment. The authors conclude that the import of corresponding institutions should be accompanied by a synthesis of “social” and “market”. It could be achieved only with the harmony of complementarity of both these aspects, not with the construction of a hierarchy between them
Keywords
institutional traps, transplantation of institutions, market of institutions, social market economy, neoliberalism