Do modern stock exchanges emerge from competition? Evidence from the “Belgian Big Bang”

The emergence of modern stock exchanges — computerised, globalised and in competition — is rarely questioned by mainstream economics, which considers this evolution as the necessary result of the “technological shock” or of the competition between exchanges. Based on the Evolutionary Political Economy approach applied to the Belgian case, this article proposes to evaluate the role that competition played in the institutional convergence experienced by European stock exchanges in the late 1980s. It will first appear, at the end of the historical survey, that the argument of “international competition” played a major role in the debates around the “Belgian Big Bang”, but was in fact not based on any reliable support: no capital flight occurred and the documents attesting to the “Belgian delay” were erroneous. We will then develop alternative explanations for the liberalisation of European stock exchanges from the perspective of economic sociology. Certain social norms — the authority of expertise, technophobia-philia, nationalism — favoured this institutional shift, more than the foreign threat. This article thus affirms the interest of a study of economic evolutions that does justice to the heterogeneity of agents, to power (especially cognitive power) and to social norms.