Curaçao 2010 – 2025; Reconsidering the Price of Autonomy

Reconsidering the Price of Autonomy offers an institutional-economic analysis of Curaçao’s experience fifteen years after attaining autonomous country status within the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Rather than focusing solely on debates around governance reform, compliance, and oversight, the essay shifts attention to the deeper institutional conditions that shape policy outcomes in practice. Drawing on insights from the New Institutional Economics, it examines the interaction between formal autonomy and informal institutions, administrative capacity, implementation dynamics, and historical path dependency. The essay argues that persistent challenges cannot be explained by reform deficits alone, but are rooted in the way institutional ordering functions as a system. Written for policymakers, scholars, and practitioners, the publication provides a structured framework for understanding autonomy not as a constitutional endpoint, but as an ongoing institutional process requiring continuity, learning, and state capacity.