Abstract. In our tentative to bring some useful elements necessary in defining our transition, we think we should start from establishing the final goals of this process. This means that, from the very beginning, we accept the thesis that the transition from the Marxist socialism to the capitalist market economy is a limited in time process, having a precise finality which, once reached, marks its end. Between the real economy and the nominal one there is a permanent interaction, the state of the economic system existing in that period of time exerting its special mark upon it. The interaction real-nominal has certain characteristics, generated by the substance of the process concerning the institutional transformations, by the impact it produces on the economic system as a whole and by the components of the economic agents, where the economic acts and facts are created.

Keywords: real economy; nominal economy; informal economy; transition, transformation.