ABSTRACT
In the past century, the traditional framework used for the analysis of economic systems reflected the ideological divide and the Cold War between two opponent regimes of capitalism and communism. There was in general more interest in the descriptive and comparative analysis of capitalism and communism. Little attention went to theorising on the formation, evolution, and differentiation of economic systems, with the exception of several basic contributions in Eckstein (1971). It is not surprising, therefore, that once the choice between capitalism and communism was no longer relevant, after 1990, the subdiscipline of economic systems came to face an identification crisis.
