The paper claims that the analysis of the private business sector needs to concentrate on entrepreneurship. Based on fieldwork the paper proceeds by describing how Chinese entrepreneurs perceive the (economic) problems whose solutions pre-determine the economic performance of new firms....

The Market Design (MD) approach to institutional analysis provides the analytical tools to evaluate endogenous institution building in local market places irrespective of the institutional setting of the national economy. Implicit in this analysis of endogenous institution building at the market...

This paper offers a new data set and window to empirically test Leviathan theory in the sense of China's transition economy. By combining time series and cross-section regression analysis and various variables used by previous empirical studies, we test the Leviathan hypothesis for vertical...

The Chinese economy has developed rapidly despite two major constraints: ill-functioning markets and a socialist past, both of which caused an environment of unenforceable contracts. In this situation the need to pool resources and to govern relational risk was paramount to the development of a...

Chinese entrepreneurs innovatively manage organisations in the absence of strong economic institutions, under conditions of high environmental and technological uncertainty. This paper presents the findings of an empirical study designed to investigate how Chinese entrepreneurs can be successful...

To address the problem why China, as a communist country, moves in the opposite direction when the public sector has undergoing a continuous growth in most Western economies since the World War I, we offer a new approach that the de facto fiscal decentralization curtails government size in...

The development of entrepreneurship and a private business sector in China pose various challenges to analysis. On the one hand, neo-classically based New Institutional Economics aims to find evidence that long-term investment and long-term commitment in and around firms can not be expected...

This paper is part of a broader research project that aims to analyse the emerging private business sector in China by focusing on three topics.

Entrepreneurial activities in transition economies go beyond (technical) entrepreneurship. In an environment of institutional and procedural uncertainty entrepreneurs need to select business partners, choose a mode of governance that stabilizes long term business relations, and settle for such...