A way to diagnose the economic structure of a nation is to look at its institutions. Following Douglass North, a Nobel laureate in economics, “institutions determine the performance of economies” (North, 1990, p.137). Although Moldova has struggled to achieve similar economic performance to the European continent for about twenty years, the results are still mediocre. The level of the country’s economic development, expressed as GDP per capita, is less than it was in 1990, at the beginning of the process. The goal of this paper is to conduct an exploration of the main causes that hinder economic growth in Moldova and of the possibilities to gain a fair level of economic development in Moldova in the near future.