Julien Vercueil

Régulation Theory: From Textbook to Research Agenda On Robert Boyer's

Some books mark an era. With his Économie politique des capitalismes (The Political Economy of Capitalisms), Robert Boyer has written a treatise that summarises forty years of research by economists of all nationalities, under the regulationist banner. It is because he is one of the founders of this school and one of its most important contributors, and especially

The book can first be read as a textbook. The reader is led step by step through the basic concepts of the regulationist approaches and their method. These are compared to the conceptual constructions of the standard, Marxist or Keynesian theories. The concepts are articulated with one another (no fewer than 67 diagrams and charts are included for this pedagogical purpose -something that must be some sort of publishing record…), and the reader can assess their level of coherence through a few formal models used as illustrations. Lastly, the reader can follow the author as he plunges these concepts into the great empirical sea to observe how they behave in the face of actual situations. As such, this book shows how much an oversimplification it is to confine régulation theory to an update and analysis of "Fordism".

More than a textbook, this work is also an essay that tackles complex historical and theoretical issues. One by one, China's economic expansion, the EU crisis, the imbalances being spread by a finance-driven growth model, the persistence of income inequality during periods of growth, the role of political regimes in sustaining economic trajectories, the interrelations between the forms of institutions that constitute capitalism, the role of economic rent, the environmental limits to global growth -all these topics are given an analytical interpretation that combines the tools of régulation theory coherently and personally. The essay thus opens itself up to critical debate by researchers who claim to belong to the regulationist movement and by anyone who agrees with the idea that in economics, "institutions matter".

Lastly, the book is a contribution to the régulation theory research program. It does not ignore the obstacles to the development of this theory, but instead highlights these obstacles, suggesting paths to overcome them. The points of disagreement that the reader might have with any of Boyer's proposals are invitations to resume research and extend it as far as possible in order to enter a dialogue with the theory's results, which are never set in stone. Thus, the régulation theory research program helps draft responses to the crisis that, through the economy, has taken hold of the entire field of economics.

A textbook of regulationist analysis

In forty years of various developments, régulation theory (RT) has developed a complex analytical architecture that this book endeavours to explain systematically, in a pedagogical effort aimed at young researchers interested in the institutionalist approaches of economics.

• In the beginning, there were institutions Régulation theory fits into a long list of institutionalist economic approaches. Along with sociology and political science, these approaches share the assumption that there is no capable individual without an institution. Boyer describes this idea:

One cannot conceive of a pure economy, i.e. one that would be devoid of all institutions, all forms of law or political order. The basic institutions of a market economy suppose [the existence of] actors and strategies that are not economic (p. 34).

As such, RT opposes the standard individualist view that takes the agent as a "homogeneous gobule" of "pleasures and pains" [START_REF] Veblen | Why is Economics not an Evolutionary Science?[END_REF] programmed by his desires, a programmer of his consumption.

Boyer uses a narrow definition of institutions. This definition will be discussed critically later on in this review. For now, we would merely note that this definition is quickly replaced with a broader conceptual construction that is found at the foundation of the earliest regulationist research: institutional forms. These "hidden institutions of a market economy" (p. 17) -at least, hidden for a standard theoretician -simply make it possible, by stabilising social ties, for production, trade, wage-earning and ultimately capitalism to develop. According to TR, there are five such institutional forms (hereafter "IFs"), and they cover "the management of the payment and credit system" (monetary regime, p. 22) and "the price formation process, which corresponds to a standard configuration of relations between market participants" (form of competition, p. 26); the IFs also consist of "general rules that govern salaried employment" (wage-labour nexus, p. 28), as well as "institutionalised compromises that [regulate] the trend in public spending and revenues" (form of state intervention, p. 46); lastly, they organise "the [socioeconomic] relations between the nation-state and the rest of the world" (international regime, p. 46). Altogether, they form an institutional configuration, i.e. an historically situated arrangement of these IFs that evolve in tandem over time and maintain complementary and hierarchical ties with one another, while interacting with technical and political changes (pp. 50-2).

• Regulation: Who or what regulates? What is regulated?

At cruising speed, a given institutional configuration participates in the mode of regulation (MR) of the economy. The MR is defined as the set of processes that provide a coherent and viable basis for the institutional forms of a capitalist economy, for a certain period of time (p. 33). By construction, this viability is never necessary, but always contingent. It depends both on factors that are external to the economic sphere -because modes of regulation "result from the interaction between the economic sphere and the juridico-legal sphere" (p. 34) -and on the historical development of these IFs. This development eventually produces the conditions that make an economic crisis possible.

What the MR regulates is the accumulation regime of the economy. For Boyer, describing the accumulation regime (AR) amounts to formalising "the lineaments of a long-term growth model" (p. 59) of the economy. Why focus the analysis on accumulation, and not simply on growth? Because RT is interested in capitalisms, not in the market economies of standard economic theory. Capital accumulation is at the heart of the evolution of capitalisms: through its own dynamics, accumulation supports the expansion of capitalism, but also precipitates it into crises. Thereby building on Marxist theories (as well as those of the Austrian School), RT emphasises the constant trend towards capital overaccumulation. In reaction to this powerful underlying trend, the mode of regulation continuously aims to renew the conditions for stabilising the accumulation regime. The conjunction of an MR and an AR is referred to as a mode of development (p. 62).

• When the mode of development undergoes a crisis One of the essential aims of RT is "to analyse then formalise simultaneously a mode of regulation and its crisis forms" (p. 7). RT is even more capable of theorising crisis because, unlike standard economic theory, it "does not postulate that an institutional configuration exists that provides an optimal mode of regulation in every time and every place" (p. 33). Likewise, RT draws "all the consequences of the absence of a canonical accumulation regime. Each accumulation regime has its own form of crisis" (p. 45). When the mode of development undergoes a crisis, all its components are affected: "crises are the very translation of the traits of the mode of regulation and the accumulation regime" (p. 81).

One possible source of crisis is discord between the temporalities of action and evolution of IFs:

Each institutional form develops its own temporality [. We see here the importance of the irreversibilities that characterise the temporal processes in the conceptualisations of RT. The telescoping of temporalities leads to conflicts in incentives and constraints on economic agents. These disadjustments eventually accumulate and set the stage for a crisis. Yet these incoherencies in the rhythms of institutions are far from the only sources of crisis.

RT offers a plethora of typologies. Thus, in Boyer's book, we find IF, MR and AR typologies. RT also produces a typology of crises (p. 84). The first type of crisis is linked to external shocks; the 1973 oil shock is one example. Then there are endogenous (or cyclical) crises, which express the prevailing mode of regulation, such as the business cycles in the nineteenth century. Crises of the mode of regulation are deeper, showing the limits to the corrective capacities of the MR, in light of the existing accumulation regime. The Great Depression in the US in 1929-32 is one of these. An additional degree of severity occurs when the accumulation regime itself is in crisis. Here, RT uses the term "major crisis". In such cases, "the most essential institutional forms" are challenged. In Boyer's view, the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the Japanese crisis of the 1990s fall into this category. Lastly, a structural crisis of the mode of production (this expression is borrowed from Marxism and contrasts capitalism with traditional domestic economies or Soviet-type economies) affects the foundational institutions of the society and the economy. The collapse of the Soviet system in the late 1980s is an illustration.

If we adopt a Schumpeterian view of crisis, it can be interpreted as a process of creative destruction of the institutions that characterise the MR. It is not difficult to pinpoint the start of a crisis in a mode of regulation, or even an accumulation regime -in Japan, for example, the crisis was "evidenced by the failures of public spending stimulus policies or by a monetary policy of near-zero interest rates" (p. 90) -but it is much harder to forecast what may come out of a crisis. On this level, we note one peculiarity of RT qua historical theory: namely, the great caution of most RT economists -including Boyer -with regard to making forecasts:

We can only observe ex post whether a viable modality for interaction between politics and economics emerges (p. 44), which would signal the emergence of a new mode of development.

• Régulation theory is also a method Compared to the standard or Keynesian approaches, the regulationist approach is not strongly normative; Boyer considers it to be "more analytic than normative" (p. 198). Conversely, with regard to methodological questions, RT lays out relatively precise rules of method and clearly asserts its methodological specificity vis-à-vis the approaches that preceded it.

RT's first claim relates to the interconnection between the theoretical and the empirical. The subtitle of Boyer's book uses the term "theory", although the epistemologist Claude [START_REF] Mouchot | Méthodologie économique[END_REF] prefers to speak of "approaches" to describe regulationist productions. Moreover, Boyer acknowledges -perhaps with a reflexive nuance -that "economists probably abusively use the term 'theory' to designate an ad hoc model" (p. 156); throughout his book, we find several examples of such ad hoc models. Yet what matters is not this semantic distinction so much as the research method. In RT, the theoretical edifice is not built using a hypotheticodeductive method (or allegedly hypothetico-deductive, along the lines of the ex post hypotheses and models of standard theory that fill scientific journals). Instead, it uses abductive reasoning, i.e. a series of explicit back-and-forths between concepts and observations. As explanations are built ex post, they lead to ad hoc theories. However, Boyer distinguishes between ad hoc in the good sense -i.e. in agreement with stylised facts drawn from observation -[and ad hoc] in the pejorative sense -in this case, resulting from a subjective choice based on a particular view of the social world (p. 156).

Thus, when speaking of theories, there are at least two ad hoc forms. Here, the regulationist method is unique in that it does not fall into what Hayek described as the "misery of historicism", while claiming the historicity of the theory.

The regulationist analytical framework is broad enough to welcome different interpretations of a single historical series of events. As such, RT is presented as "voluntarily underdetermined: it is up to empirical analysis to specify the nature of the institutional forms for a given economy and period" (p. 47). TR stands apart from Neo-Marxist theories by renouncing visions that are "grandiose" and all-encompassing, but slightly disconnected from empirical questions. Instead, RT elaborates the "intermediary concepts" of IFs and the accumulation regime. The accumulation regime concept, backed by the national accounts of the economies in question (an approach that presupposes updated and regular data, robust enough for examination), makes the analysis more precise. Compared to Marxist reproduction schemes, this concept has the advantage of resorting to more diverse explanatory factors than the mere combination of the wage-labour nexus and competition forms (p. 40).

Another methodological specificity of RT is its focus on the realism of its hypotheses. Thus, the MR concept stands apart from the equilibrating automatisms of standard economic theory due to the fact that, to fulfil its role, it does not require unrealistic conditions for the cognitive capacities of economic actors: to "reproduce, from one period to the next, the prevailing institutional configuration without any major alterations", there is no need to resort to "interiorisation by the economic actors of the overall rules governing the entire system" (p. 48), precisely what is required by the hypothesis of rational expectations, the improbable cornerstone of standard monetary theory.

Nevertheless, the methodological precautions taken by RT have a downside: the limited impact of the theory on society and especially decision-makers.

Institutionalists are proponents of systemic causality, which is difficult to transpose into public debate [...] By construction, [regulationist approaches] shy away from proposing a general recipe that would just need to be followed, before any precise analysis of the local and historical context [...] Worse, [in the current context] they contribute to the despair of political leaders because they regard action on the traditional levers [of economic policy] as no substitute for reshaping institutional forms, necessary for another mode of development to emerge. Lastly, by clearly stating the importance of political coalitions in the viability of any strategy for ending a crisis, [these approaches] introduce a relativism that proves to [their] opponents that [RT] is not a scientific theory, because it rejects strictly economic determinism" (p. 197).

From this point, the book moves on to a more problem-oriented dimension, similar to an essay rather than a mere textbook. We intend to explore this dimension in the next section of this review.

An essay on political economy

The empirical problems handled in the book are too numerous to be described exhaustively in a simple book review. We will choose to focus on those that seem to illustrate the author's specific tonality within the regulationist movement. We will also focus our discussion on these problems.

• In the old industrialised countries: After Fordism, the deluge?

In regulationist research, debates have raged for the past three decades as to the putative successor to Fordism. In the US, the birthplace of Fordism, the crisis of this mode of development was made visible by "the exhaustion of previous sources of productivity gains" (p. 66), which in turn grew out of the conjunction of a unique technico-economic trend -the increasing differentiation of products -and the socio-political contestation of assembly-line work.

However, Boyer provides a precise analysis of the chain of events leading to Fordism being replaced after its crisis. In a first stage, the opening up of trade and finance triggered a shift in the IF hierarchy: the wage-labour nexus, which had until then imposed its own dynamic on the other institutional forms, was gradually dominated by the international regime, which tended to impose its own rules. The Keynesian monetary regime was replaced by the monetarist regime, which, due to the collapse of the international monetary system (this all takes place in the 1970s), led to a conjunction of unstable currencies and a rise in real interest rates. This weighed on investment, while the state, no longer able to monetise its deficit, began to build up debt (pp. 243-5). In a second stage (in the late 1980s), global competition grew more intense, while also becoming financialised. Labour -and with it the wage-labour nexus -came against competition on an international scale, thanks to the increased mobility of goods and capital, whereas a standard of high financial returns took hold in the regime of competition between firms.

The power of financial agents to mobilise masses of capital based on their view of the future sets in motion the whole of society and causes a succession of credit-driven phases of expansion, suddenly interrupted by a reversal of expectations (pp. 245-6).

This "second major transformation" is characterised by a "process of liberalisation that challenged most of the institutions and organisations that had enabled global growth after the Second World War" (p. 10). Has it given rise to a full-fledged mode of development, driven by the financial sector? The corresponding accumulation regime is deemed to be "viable but, ultimately, plagued by instability" (p. 98), insofar as the wealth effects caused by financial accumulation can, in the short and medium terms, support global demand, but inevitably run up against the exuberance of this very accumulation, which degenerates into speculative bubbles. Crisis emerges from the fact that there is "a threshold above which financialisation destabilises the macroeconomic equilibrium" (p. 100). Monetary regulation must simultaneously make sure that the economy is open to international finance and that no financial bubbles occur, but it can no longer be successful in this twofold mission. The gap widens between the return on economic capital and the return on financial capital, signalling that this regime is unsustainable in the long term (pp. 101-2).

The Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) of the European Union took shape against this fundamentally unstable backdrop. Without going into detail on the author's observations on this subject, we would note his emphasis on the lack of political legitimacy for this mainly top-down institutional construction. Granted, a "Europe of rules" was built, but not a "Europe of transfers", or at least, not on a scale that would legitimise it by curbing the rise in inequality. By denying the obvious fact that monetary stability does not necessarily lead to financial stability, the European elites assumed that the former would be enough to support the euro's legitimacy. The faulty exogenous money supply hypothesis, embedded in the monetarist theory that inspired the form given to the EMU, contributed to policy-makers being blinded to the "speculative bubbles linked to the boom in private lending, facilitated by low nominal interest rates" (pp. 264-5). More broadly, as shown by Michel Aglietta and Thomas Brand (2013) in their work on the topic: all the member countries of the monetary union are supposed to have the same type of regulation, apart from size effects. If, however, the productive capacities, the quality of the public system and the international insertion of Greece are totally different from those of Germany, then the single currency will exacerbate the macroeconomic divergences. This is effectively what has been observed, which is in no way a surprise (p. 265).

Apart from the European case, Boyer considers one of the major challenges facing RT to be the difficulty in characterising the forthcoming accumulation regimes in mature capitalisms. After the 1970s, these capitalisms have not suffered any shocks strong enough to unsettle them, but instead a succession of "trials and errors in the face of radical uncertainty that has hardly diminished" (p. 311).

• Characterising an emerging capitalism: The case of China

The second major challenge for RT comes from China. What explanation can be given for the long period -more than three decades -of expansion in China with no major crises, even as so many indicators -"overaccumulation", "inequalities in the status of urban and rural inhabitants", "magnitude and frequency of social protests", "explosion of inequalities" (p. 220) -show that tensions are building up? Boyer's main thesis is that despite its degree of commercial openness and its participation in globalisation, China's mode of regulation remains dominated by national institutional forms. Social compromises are rooted in "the partial alignment of the interests of the political class with those of the entrepreneurs", supporting a sort of "local corporatism" (p. 218) encouraged by the central authorities, who view this as the surest way of cashing in on -and prolongingthe Communist Party's political monopoly.

Admittedly, accumulation in China is driven by explosive and long-lasting productivity gains. Yet these gains are mainly based on a massive shift from low-productivity agricultural jobs to more productive industrial and service jobs, and on the incorporation of foreign technologies (Asian and Western) into the national production system, with such technologies being obtained in exchange for access to a huge, strongly-expanding market and a very low-cost workforce, in a stabilised institutional context (pp. 218-9). The "nearly continuous decline in the labour share of national income" (p. 222) is the most certain indication of the profoundly destabilising character of the Chinese accumulation regime. It is also one of the reasons behind its commercial expansionism internationally, which Boyer interprets as a projection abroad of the fundamental characteristics of the national mode of regulation.

• Globalisation and the "three-body problem"

The interpenetration of national economies has curbed each political system's capacity to guide macroeconomic trends within its own territory. Moreover, globalisation has consolidated the "hegemonic blocs" -i.e. the political coalitions that can remain in power over a long period of time, according to the terminology used by [START_REF] Gramsci | Cahiers de prison[END_REF] and [START_REF] Poulantzas | Pouvoir politique et classes sociales de l'État capitaliste[END_REF], and adopted by Boyer -within each nation-state. In the US, the interests of multinational firms are faithfully promoted by the Republicans and by the Democrats, regardless of which party holds the White House. In Europe, the elites who are the winners of globalisation work assiduously to prolong the sacrifices imposed on the workforce in order to respect the single currency's founding rules. In China, WTO membership has increased the influence of modernisers within the CCP, who have imposed their view of the conditions for stabilising the social pact by continued liberalisation of the national economy and opening it up to foreign capital.

The world has gone from being bipolar (with capitalism and socialism facing off until the 1980s) to tripolar, with the weakening of the US, the gradual affirmation of the EU as the world's largest commercial bloc, then the emergence of China as an industrial power (p. 277). This trinity of powers, more or less unstable, is replicated in a structural tripolarity: industrial capitalisms, on one side, with rent economies rich in natural resources and finance-dominated capitalisms on the other. In theory, the coevolution of these three forms of capitalism is likely to cause chaotic trajectories -as an analogy to Henri Poincaré's "three-body problem" (p. 258). Yet in practice, the conjunction of the Chinese, US and European modes of regulation has avoided any major crises up to now, despite ever heavier threats to their accumulation regimes: in 2009, China's stimulus measures prevented the international financial crisis from becoming a depression like in the 1930s. In 2011, the EU's austerity policies were offset by the pragmatism of US monetary policy, which supported growth (p. 277).

These analyses, added to those (not presented here) of dependent capitalisms and rent regimes, confirm that "internationalisation has increased the diversity of capitalisms". In Boyer's view, "taking [this diversity] into account has become necessary to understand their combined evolution" in the processes of globalisation (pp. 278-9). We must now turn to the possible future developments of RT in this direction, as well as the tools at its disposal. Here, we will look at the research program put forth by the book.

A research program

Recent developments in RT have introduced a series of new issues that have yet to be researched thoroughly. Boyer's book addresses, one after the other, the various types and levels of institutions (chapter 5), the institutional configurations of contemporary capitalisms and their evolution (chapters 6 and 8), incorporating the political aspect (chapter 7), and the various levels of regulation and the transition from one mode of regulation to another (chapters 9 and 10). For the purposes of this review, we will present and discuss two questions that run through these chapters:

1. What are the relevant concepts to deal with regulations that go beyond the national framework? 2. How can institutional evolution be analysed systematically in RT?

• Post-national institutional arrangements

The institutional forms of RT are presented as concepts that establish a link between the microeconomy and the macroeconomy. Indeed, these forms are "the obligatory crossing point between macroeconomic regularities and individual and collective behaviours" (p. 132). If we accept this premise, how should we interpret the plethora of concepts added, since the 1980s, to the IF concept, to strengthen RT's explanatory power? --The notion of productive models was introduced in research by the GERPISA Group to reflect the fact that the productive sphere is an historically-situated social construct.

This notion describes both the heterogeneity of the organisational configurations exhibited by the sectors and channels of a national economy, and a form of homology identifiable in productive organisations that are a priori disjoined from a geographic, legal or economic standpoint (pp. 135-7).

--The notion of social innovation systems borrows and builds on the notion of national innovation systems developed by Neo-Schumpeterian theory. It aims to describe the mode of operation of systems of training, R&D, production and commercialisation whose objective is to respond to the imperative for new products and production processes (pp. 139-43).

--The notions of skill-labour nexus and inequality regimes refer to the way in which a society aims to resolve problems of knowledge access and management of wealth and income disparities. These social processes are generally overdetermined by prior choices regarding the role that the public authorities should play and the socialisation of spending in the economy (pp. 145-59).

--Lastly, one final theme in recent regulationist research is the social relationship to nature "rapport social à la nature". In light of the growing importance of environmental issues on the economic and social levels, at the local, regional and planetary scales, what theoretical status should be given to these issues? Rather than making this relationship into a sixth institutional form, in a Polanyian approach that would emphasise the importance for society as a whole to reach an agreement on how to deal with nature, the RT authors have preferred to make it an environmental institutional device, i.e. "the projection of institutional forms on the space of the relationships between economy and environment" (p. 162).

For each notion, RT must resolve the question of its relationship with the five pre-existing institutional forms. It must also show how the tools it has developed enable these notions to be brought into agreement with the concepts of accumulation regime and mode of regulation:

The prospect of a future curb on growth due to environmental constraints invites [us] to mobilise two of the contributions of régulation theory. On the one hand, taking account [...] of the various forms of irreversibility, and on the other, the emphasis on understanding processes and trajectories, and not convergence towards long-term equilibrium (p. 166).

Here again, we see one of the peculiarities already mentioned with regard to the normative character of RT: its normativity is expressed much more in terms of method than results.

• Systematising the approach to institutions and their evolution: Why a detour through earlier research would be useful

As an institutionalist approach, RT must be based on a coherent theory of institutions and their evolution. In this respect, despite the book's efforts to systematise the approach, readers may remain somewhat unconvinced.

The first stumbling block lies in the book's approach to the market. "Market" and "institution" are placed in opposition, as if the market were of a fundamentally different nature to an institution. In chapter 1, institutions are presented as "alternative coordination mechanisms to the market" (p. 17). Boyer, seeking "more solid bases [than a mere listing of examples of institutions] for institutional economics", does not notice the features common to both entities, namely "standards, values, conventions, legal rules, organisations, networks, the state, etc." (p. 17), while endeavouring to distinguish carefully between "institutions, organisations and conventions" (p. 33). The notion of "institutional form", defined as the result of the codification of social relationships considered to be fundamental, enables a temporary escape from the difficulties caused by this vague notion of institution. However, it quickly becomes apparent that the institutional form is not enough to cope with all the questions raised by RT about modes of coordination.

To address this problem, Boyer resorts to a taxonomy of institutional economics that relies on several sources: political science and economic history [START_REF] Sabel | Constitutional orders: trust building and response to change[END_REF][START_REF] North | Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance[END_REF], neoinstitutional economics [START_REF] Coase | The Nature of the Firm[END_REF][START_REF] Williamson | Markets and Hierarchies. Analysis and Antitrust Implications[END_REF], post-Schumpeterian evolutionary theory [START_REF] Nelson | An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change[END_REF]Winter, 1982, Dosi, 2000), economics of conventions (Favereau, 1989, Boltanski and[START_REF] Boltanski | De la justification[END_REF], and sociology (Bourdieu, 1980) (pp. 119-20). In so doing, he adopts a narrow view of institutions (as sets of formal rules) that prevents him from describing the organic ties between the "constitutional order", "the institution" thus narrowly defined, "the organisation", "routine", "convention" and "the habitus" (p. 119) -organic ties that are supposed to represent the "arrangements of atoms", which are institutional forms1 (p. 117).

By taking this path, RT would deprive itself of a valuable source, in our view: that provided by the earliest institutional approaches. In Durkheimian sociology and American Institutionalism, one easily finds the means to restore the fundamental unity of these apparently heteroclite manifestations of institutional order: conventions, standards, markets, organisations and laws. Compared to what is proposed in Boyer's book, these conceptions have three advantages, in terms of anteriority, coherence and pertinence. To see their unity, the untrained eye must accept a broad view of the institution as "social fact" [START_REF] Durkheim | Les règles de la méthode sociologique[END_REF], or "collective action controlling individual action" [START_REF] Commons | Institutional Economics[END_REF]. The notions of "constitution", "organisation", "market" and "routine" are manifestations, to various degrees, of the institutional phenomenon thus defined. Of course, these definitions alone do not suffice to produce a general theory. But in fact, institutionalist literature offers an abundance of complementary theoretical descriptions [START_REF] Vercueil | Vers une économie institutionnelle du changement: clarifier les concepts et leurs articulations[END_REF] that RT could use to gain coherence from a conceptual standpoint.

In terms of microeconomics, management science's analysis of the modes of coordination in firms (Henry [START_REF] Mintzberg | The Structuring of Organizations: A Synthesis of the Research[END_REF] provides an excellent typology), which goes well beyond what economic theory can currently take into account, could also be advantageously incorporated into RT. Many of the premises of management science -such as situated rationality or environmental uncertainty -and its methods -holistic individualism, abduction -resonate with the premises of RT. If we shift from a micro perspective to a macroone, with the analysis of globalisation, we note that the analytic juncture made by Robert [START_REF] Reich | The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st--Century Capitalism[END_REF] between the forms of the globalisation of production (the fragmentation of value chains), financial globalisation (and the pressures it exerts on firms' governance), the regulation failures of public institutions set up after the Second World War (holes in the tax fence of nation-states) and the new "inequality regimes" (the widening income gap for the active population of a given country) -as important a juncture as any -is now more than twenty-five years old. It could have been the starting point for the regulationist debate on these issues -a debate that may appear disappointing in comparison.

This detour through previous analyses and theories could bring conceptual developments for RT. Such is the case for the analysis of crises, for example. As a general phenomenon incorporated into the notion of regulation, a crisis signals the incapacity of a regulating system to keep the regulated system within the boundaries of viability. Thus, it is a crisis of both the regulated system and the regulating system. When a crisis occurs, the future of the regulator-regulated pair depends on its place in the sequencing of institutional arrangementslaws, conventions, customs, as well as organisations as collective actors -and the overall coherence of this sequencing. Almost systematically, an institution of a higher general level is activated in order to compensate for the failure of the original regulating system. The depth of a crisis is thus determined by the hierarchy of arrangements that fail one after the other: RT's "small crises", "major crises", "crises of regulation", "crises of the accumulation regime" and "crises of the mode of production" can thus be viewed in light of each society's own institutional order. Hence the value of having a hierarchy of the institutional arrangements of a given society, established as rigorously as possible. Such a hierarchy would round out the excesses and flaws in the system of "institutional forms". This is a task that, in our view, has yet to be carried out in régulation theory.

Conclusion

The exploit of Boyer's book is, like the shoemaker in the fairytale, to have answered seven questions at once:

1. What are the basic institutions of a capitalist economy? 2. What are the institutional conditions for the dynamic stability of an economy? 3. What explanation can be given for recurring crises, even after a long period of growth? 4. What are the factors for transforming the institutions of capitalism? 5. How can the various forms of crisis be analysed? 6. What are the conditions for the appearance and viability of new forms of capitalism? 7. Can both a mode of regulation and its specific type of crisis be formalised? (p. 7)

The responses given throughout the book are backed by extensive evidence and examples, even though -remarkably enough -there is not a single statistical table to back up the proposed analyses, which are nevertheless firmly anchored in real life. Yet this lack of statistical evidence is not a shortcoming because the book is first and foremost an invitation to the reader to reflect on the key concepts needed to decipher the tsunami of quantitative data that washes over all of us daily.

To make this endeavour a success, there was a colossal work of selecting, analysing and reformulating scientific material accumulated over four decades. Boyer's pedagogical skill is obvious in the clear conception and writing of this synthesis. The book can be read on several levels, a fact that broadens the audience to include students. This is crucial for diffusing the author's ideas within the scientific community. For although not yet mentioned in this review, there is an element of activism in the book. This is visible, for example, in the way that Boyer considers the structuring of the community of heterodox economists. Indeed, in a Polanyian perspective, he notes that "a movement of resistance to the violence of the market is beginning", slipping into social relationships that were previously preserved. This movement

  ..]. The financial regime is the one with the shortest reaction time [...]. Competition sets in motion the accumulation process, which must face the longer temporality of the wage-labour nexus [...]. The temporality of innovation is longer than the one that characterises competition by the reduction in prices of standard products [...]. Demographics introduces yet another different timescale, [...] Habitus, representations and standards [...]. Lastly, the time of ecological processes introduces an additional dimension to this hierarchy of temporalities (pp. 129-30).

Boyer also uses the image of "building blocks" to describe these entities.

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requires "a new generation of intellectuals and theoreticians" to analyse it (p. 190). We must hope that such a posterity will read a book of this importance.


Julien Vercueil

Income inequalities, productive structure and macroeconomic dynamics. A regional approach to the Russian case

)). In this paper we analyse the Russian trajectory in three different ways. First, we compare the evolution of the « middle class » in Russia with other (B)RIC and western countries, using the wealth--based definition of this group proposed in the Global Wealth Report (Crédit Suisse Research Institute, 2015). Second, we go deeper into the Russian case in order to show how regional disparities regarding incomes distribution can be interpreted, considering the country's recent macroeconomic trajectory. For this purpose, we build a productive typology of the Russian regions and study the link between each type and the level of income inequalities, using the varying structures in sources of household's incomes as a possible explanation of regional variations. We conclude by an assessment of the remaining challenges for incomes policy in Russia.

A wealth--based definition of middle class

In the 2015 issue of its annual Global Wealth Report, the Credit Suisse Research Institute (2015) adopts a wealth--based definition of middle class. The middle class is constituted by people who possess at least 50000 US $ worth assets, and less than 500000 US $. To justify this definition, the authors explain that in terms of economic behaviour and aspirations, wealth ownership has a unifying influence across the world, related to what we usually consider to be the middle--class' way of life. Moreover, contrary to an income-based definition, wealth--based definition allows to take into account the resilience and relative socio--economic stability of middle class households, since this amount of assets

Provisory paper, comments welcome / Not for quotation / can be interpreted as an insurance against a sudden drop of income (Crédit Suisse Research Institute, 2015, p. 28). The authors chose the United States as the benchmark economy, international comparison being carried using IMF PPP exchange rates. The result of this confrontation is summarised in Table 1. Sources: Crédit Suisse Research Institute (2015a), p. 32, and(2015b), p. 120.

As far as Russia is concerned, this definition seems to underestimate the size of the middle class when compared to other countries. Indeed, in relative terms, this group is presented as comparable to its Indian counterpart (resp. 4,1 % and 3 % of the population), whereas in terms of per capita GDP, real income and consumption expenditures, the situation of Russia is far more favourable. Therefore, in the following analysis we use these figures for time--series comparison and not cross--sections analysis.

Our aim is to compare the impact of recent economic fluctuations on the evolutions of each member of this set of countries. During the 2000--2007 period, all countries enjoyed an increase of the number of people belonging to the wealth--defined middle class (Table 2). The most spectacular growth occurred in China, which managed to increase the group by more than 100 millions people. In Russia, with a population of 143 millions people, the increase was of 11 millions people, approximately the same amount as for United States (over 300 millions people, of which more than a third was already part of the middle class) and India (with a total population of 1 billion). The crisis period (identified by the author of the Credit Suisse Research Institute study as 2007--2008, although for number of countries like Russia, the most acute period of the crisis was 2008--2009) provoked a sudden drop of the middle class population. In China 67 millions people were expelled from this category in only two years while in the United States and in India, the figures are of 6,8 and 5,5 millions respectively. In Russia, the drop was less acute (2,5 millions people quitted the group). By contrast, after 2008 Russia was the only country in which the drop of the middle class population continued. Russia's middle class lose 9,2 millions people when in China, it gained 8,5 millions, in the United States --17 millions, and in India --0,7 million. These contrasting evolutions confirm the "divergence hypothesis".

According to this hypothesis, due to the varying growth models of BRICS countries their macroeconomic trajectories tended to diverge as soon as the financial crisis of 2007 began to affect the world economy (Vercueil ( 2015)).

Starting from these broad, comparative observations, we intend to characterize more precisely the consequences of the changing world macroeconomic conditions on income distribution in Russia. To this aim, we use the regional dataset provided by Rosstat (2015), featuring value added sectorial composition, incomes evolution, structure and distribution. The hypothesis is that the regional level of analysis can help us to understand the recent changes affecting income distribution at the macro--level.

2. Inside Russia: regional development and productive structure A number of regional aspects of the Russian economy are well known. Russia is a largely urbanized society. Near to three quarters of the population live in urban area. The urbanization process is still at works, accompanied with a westernization of the population, eastern regions are loosing people regularly, at a pace that is higher than the natural demographic trend and indicates an emigration trend. The largest western cities have benefitted from this trend. Since 2005 Moscow, St Petersburg and their region's population grew 20 times faster than the rest of the country. They now account for 18,3 % of the national population. More generally, the thirty--seven biggest cities (those that have more than 500000 habitants) gather 29,5% of the country's population. Among them, 24 are situated in the European part of the territory. However, this urbanization trend does not totally match the evolution of the overall production distribution (Chart 1). For instance, the regional repartition of per capita GDP doesn't show that big cities (dark blue bars in Chart 1) produce more wealth than some relatively remote, poorly populated regions (green bars). This is because some of the latter regions are well endowed with natural resources that require capital intensive, labour saving productions technologies. Hence, the amount of per capita regional GDP can be very high since it reflects the level of productivity of extractive industries. In turn, this productivity level is directly and positively tied to the world prices of raw materials, the bulk of which are being exported by Russia.

Source: Rosstat (2015) 3. A productive typology of regions To illustrate the abovementioned link at the regional level, we can first observe that there is a strong correlation between the intensity in raw materials production of the region and its per capita GDP (Graph 2). This correlation implies that, given the relatively modest number of regions that enjoy a comfortable natural resources endowment, strong fiscal policies are needed to correct the distortion effects on incomes of the unequal sectorial structure of regions. In order to examine the relation between the productive structure of Russian regions and their characteristics in terms of income distribution, we construct a simple regional productive typology. For this purpose we use the Rosstat regional dataset presenting the structure of the value added by sectors. Starting from the 15 different sectors distinguished by Rosstat, we divide them according to their structural relation to the current world markets and competition. "Rent--providing" sectors are those that can directly benefit from the rise of raw materials prices. When world prices are sufficiently high, they provide a rent for producers who enjoy the positive outcomes of an oligopolistic situation as they have an exclusive access to certain deposits. "Non tradable" sectors are sheltered from the world competition either because of their very nature (some services cannot be imported), either because of national regulation regarding their activities (public services). On the contrary, "tradable" sectors' products can be exported or imported. Therefore firms belonging to this sector are exposed to foreign competition -even if, in some cases, a certain degree of protection can also be provided by the government. Table 2 present the result of our re--arranging of these sectors regarding their belonging to each type.

Tradable sectors

Source: author's elaboration At the national level, the Russian economy exhibits the following structure: rent-providing sectors represents 15,2% of the total value added; non tradable sectors, 63%; tradable sectors, 28%. We consider this national distribution of weight and the national average per capita income as the benchmarks for the regional analysis. We distribute Russian regions among the 3 following types: Type 1. Outward oriented, rent--providing regions: in those regions, rent--providing sectors accounts for more than 25% of the regional value added (that is, far more than the national average). Type 2. Non--tradables intensive regions: in these regions, non--tradable sectors account for at least 60% of the value added (their weight is equal to or higher than the national average). Type 3. Exposed regions: in these regions, tradable sectors represent more than 30% of the national value added (more than the national average).

Analysing 84 Russian regions with these criteria, we end up with a regional typology presented in Table 3: 16 regions fall into the "rent providing" group, 36 can be considered as "non--tradables intensive" ones and 32 are of the "exposed" type. It can be noted that the first group is composed of some of the richest regions in terms of GDP. Its 2014 average per capita GDP is two times higher than the national average, and three times higher than in the two other groups. 4. From productive structure to income distribution: a first look into Russian regions What is the influence of a given productive structure on the distribution of income? According to Rosstat statistics and using implied PPP exchange rates of the IMF, at the national level 16% of the population earn more than 2000 US $ per month. This figure confirms our previous comment on the wealth--based criterion used by the Credit Suisse Research Institute for defining the middle class: it tends to underestimate the number of Russian citizens who should be considered as belonging to this category (only 4%, cf. supra). On the other hand, like in other emerging countries, income distribution in Russia is strongly concentrated: less than 37% of the population earn more than the national average. This leads us to ask whether the productive type of region could be associated with a specific pattern of income distribution. For providing a first look at this problem, we compare Gini coefficients by regions. As we combine the Gini coefficient with per capita GDP, we obtain a picture that confirms our first findings: rent--providing regions, that are more productive than others, tend also to be more unequal. In graph 4, nine of them are situated in Q4, the quadrant in which a region exhibit both per capita GDP and Gini coefficient being higher than the average. On the opposite side, only two exposed regions (out of 32) enjoy a relatively high level of per capita GDP. They are both situated in Q4 and have a share of rent--providing sectors in their value added that, while being inferior to the 30 % limit, is superior to the national average. Most (more than twenty) of the remaining exposed regions are situated in Q2, where Gini coefficient and per capita GDP levels are lower than the national average. As regards per capita GDP, seven non--tradables intensive regions are equal or above the average. Among them are Moscow, St Petersburg and the oblast of Leningrad.

  Graph 4. Types of regions, per capita GDP and Gini coefficient : rent--providing regions : non--tradable intensive regions : exposed regions Source: author's elaboration based on Rosstat (2015) 5. Who earns what? Sources of income and productive types of region The last step of our study is to use Rosstat data on households' income sources to shed more light on our typology of Russian regions. The Rosstat survey distinguishes five sources of revenues: salary, business incomes, property revenues, social transfers and other sources. This last category is composed of hidden revenues, remittances and currency sales. During the last decade, the fundamental structure of households' incomes sources did not change. The main source is salaries. They account for more than 40% of the total. Two other important sources are social transfers and other sources. Put together, they represented almost 45% of revenues in 2014, showing a slightly rising tendency since 2005. The remaining 14--15% are divided into business incomes (8--9%) and property revenues (little less than 6%) (Graph 5

Table 1 . Wealth--based definition of middle class: an international comparison Wealth lower bound of middle class, US $ (PPP)

 1

	Middle class,	Above middle
	% of the	class, % of the
	population	population

Table 2 . Comparative middle class dynamics, 2000--2015 2000--2007 2007--2008 2008--2015 Total 2000--2015

 2

	..of which middle class	..of which beyond middle class

2. Raw materials intensity of value added and per capita GDP of the Russian regions, 2014

	Graph
	Ненецкий автономный	Ханты--Мансийский автономный	Сахалинская область	Чукотский автономный округ	Республика Саха (Якутия)	Республика Коми	Красноярский край	Камчатский край	Мурманская область	Томская область	Белгородская область	Московская область	Оренбургская область	Иркутская область	Республика Башкортостан	Краснодарский край	Архангельская область	Калининградская область	Новгородская область	Нижегородская область	Республика Карелия	Республика Хакасия	Астраханская область	Амурская область	Кемеровская область	Курская область	Смоленская область	Еврейская автономная область	Тверская область	Ростовская область	Орловская область	Забайкальский край	Пензенская область	Республика Мордовия	Чувашская Республика	Брянская область	Алтайский край	Кировская область	Республика Северная Осетия -	Ивановская область	Республика Калмыкия	Карачаево--Черкесская Республика	Республика Ингушетия

Source: author's elaboration based on

Rosstat (2015)

Table 3 . A productive typology of Russian regions

 3

	RENT PROVIDING REGIONS (16)	NON TRADABLES INTENSIVE REGIONS (36)	EXPOSED REGIONS (32)
	ARKHANGELSK	ADYGUES	ALTAI KRAI
	CHUKOTKA	ALTAI R.	BACHKORTOSTAN
	IRKUTSK	AMUR	BELGOROD
	KEMEROVO	ASTRAKHAN	CHELYABINSK
	KHANTI MANSIISK	BRIANSK	CHUVACHIA
	KOMI	BURIATIA	KABARDINO--BALKARIA
	MAGADAN	CHECHNYA	KALMYKIA
	MURMANSK	DAGHESTAN	KALOUGA
	ORENBURG	EVREI	KARACHAEVO--TCHERKESSIA
	SAKHA--YAKUTIA	INGOUCHETYA	KIROV
	SAKHALINE	IVANOVO	KOSTROMA
	TATARSTAN	KAKHASSIA	KOURGAN
	TOMSK	KALININGRAD	KOURSK
	TYUMEN	KAMTCHATKA	KRASNOÏARSK
	UDMURTIA	KARELIA	LIPETSK
	YAMALO--NENETS	KHABAROVSK	MARII--EL
		KRASNODAR	MORDOVIA
		LENINGRAD O	NIJEGOROD
		MAGADAN	NOVGOROD
		MOSCOW	OMSK
		MOSCOW O.	ORENBURG
		NORTH OSSETIA	ORLOV
		NOVOSIBIRSK	PENZA
		PRIMORIE	PERM
		PSKOV	RIAZAN
		ROSTOV	SAMARA
		SMOLENSK	SARATOV
		ST PETERSBURG	TAMBOV
		STAVROPOL	TOULA
		SVERDLOVSK	VLADIMIR
		TVER	VOLGOGRAD
		TYVA	VOLOGDA
		ULIANOVSK
		VORONEJ
		YAROSLAVL
		ZABAIKALSKI
	Source: author's elaboration

Graph 5. Structure of households' revenues, 2005--2014

Source: Rosstat ( 2015) At the regional level, the distribution of incomes sources varies largely. For instance, salaries represent 80% of the total in Chukotka, against less than 12% in the Daghestan Republic. Conversely, in the Tyva Republic, social transfers amount to a third of the average income of households, whereas in the Yamalo--Nenets Okrug, they represent only 12%. Other revenues exhibit even wider variations across regions: in Daghestan and Adygues republics, they represent more than 50% of the total revenues, whereas in Yamalo--Nenets Okrug, Chukotka and Magadan the proportion is not higher than 2%. In order to link these regional variations to our broader problem of inequality in Russia, we study the relation between the productive typology of regions and their varying sources of incomes. We find that rent--providing regions tend to have a higher share of salaries in the total income than the average. This is mainly due to the role played in the local economy by the raw materials extracting companies that represent a significant proportion of local employment and distribute high wages in order to attract workers in these remote, desert and harsh--climate regions. At the same time, numerous exposed regions tend to benefit more than the average from social transfers. Some of themnotably the poorest ones, in which the agricultural sector is prominent -rely also to other sources of revenues (remittances, currency sales and revenue from the grey economy). Within the non--tradables intensive regions, two sub--groups must be distinguished: in the first one, salaries are the main source of revenues, above the national average as for rent--providing regions. These regions (Kamtchatka, Moscow city, St Petersburg amont others) are also the wealthiest of their category. They have managed to benefit from the development of non--tradable sectors (services, construction and real estate mainly) by attracting part of the revenues produced by the rent--providing regions. It is in these regions that a large part of the Russian middle class is living. The second sub--group is constituted of the poorest non--tradables intensive regions, in which other activities -grey economy, remittances, currency sales --provide the main source of income for local households. Geographically, these regions are mainly Conclusion: the productive structure as a challenge for redistribution policies Albeit very preliminary, this study provides several interesting empirical findings regarding the link between the productive structure of Russia and the income distribution.

J. Vercueil / Income inequalities, productive structure and macroeconomic dynamics. Russian regions./ Provisory paper, comments welcome / Not for quotation / First, it shows that the Russian middle class has suffered more than its counterparts in other BRICS from the recent crises. One of the reasons of this impact is the dependence of the Russian economy on raw material prices, which reveals the role of the productive structure of the economy in the national income distribution. Second, it shows that, at the regional level, income inequalities remain important in Russia. Part of these inequalities can be explained by the natural resources endowment distribution across regions in Russia. Third, a simple productive typology of regions permits to shed light on the forces that tend to drive income distribution in Russia. Rent--providing regions are not only wealthier than others, they are also associated with a higher share of salaries in households income. But this source of income can prove vulnerable since world raw material prices are unstable and largely beyond the control of the Russian firms that produce them. Moreover, relatively poor non--tradables intensive and exposed regions rely more extensively on remittances and hidden revenues that are particularly vulnerable to the macroeconomic conjuncture. Fourth, social transfers can theoretically buffer these vulnerabilities. But they depend on the ability of the State to lesser the dependency of the budgetary resources from the price of raw materials. This has not been done in Russia during the past decade and therefore remains one of the most pressing challenges of the redistribution policy in Russia.

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