ESOPE gathers researchers of severals countries (France, India, Brazal, Mexico, Morroco, China), who priotirize three types of questioning in their works :

Area 1: Consistency of the notion of “emergence”

The consistency of the category must be questioned while term “emerging economy” is increasingly substituted for “developing economies” even in the political speeches of some of the poorest African countries. The notion of “emergence” has no counterpart in English language and the emerging process has no clear definition contrary to the development one.

• What is emergence and what is new with it?
• Does it shed light on the huge mutations experienced by a series of Asian and Latin American countries during the last two decades (liberalization, financial development and openness, extensive institution building, technological capacity building by imitation and innovation, openness to international trade and integration in global supply chains, increasing vulnerability and instability)?
  

Area 2: Model or trajectories?

• Are there emerging trajectories or is there a model of emerging economies?
• What drives emerging economies?
• Is it only a growth acceleration spurred by domestic expenses or by foreign trade or do these economies transform growth in output into socio-economic development through institutional transformations?
• Can we identify new forms of development or is the history repeating at a different pace although? What is the best scale to assess emerging paths?
• How can we model the dynamics of institutional patterns and evaluate their efficiency and their limits?
  

Area 3: Contradictions and challenges

The speed of actual mutations and the absence of a shared definition of Emerging generate new questions.

• Are there threshold or reversal effects, is there a specific vulnerability attached to the way countries grow, trade and finance their development?

• Rapid growth characterizes emerging economies. Is it sustainable as it threats to produce its proper social and environmental limits?

• Are the threats to local or global different because of the speed of mutations?
• How can we explain the paradoxes of emerging countries: openness and protection, mutations of the fiscal policies and public actors, weakness of internal consumption expenses but high investment rates, comparative advantages both rooted on progresses (industrial modernization, new rules and institutions …) and on regressions (low paid and low standard work, poor protection of workers and of population, poverty resilience and inequalities, traffics and corruption …)?
• How can emerging countries modify the international system through bigger influence in global governance (IMF, UNO, WTO, etc)?