The totality of social, cultural, and institutional forms and supports available to enterprises. This includes trade associations, voluntary agencies, sectoral coalitions, concrete institutions, and local elites—their effects on local policy, and their consensus institutions: common agreements, shared views and interpretations, and unwritten laws.
There is some direct evidence (Evans and Harding, Policy and Politics 25) that the economic performance of a region is directly related to the depth of its institutional thickness, so that public policy-makers recommend its expansion in ‘lagging regions’, but weak regional economies may have well-developed institutional thickness, and institutional capacities do not exist in isolation from broader social, political, and economic structures, and may not be transferable.
