There is a broad agreement that political and economic institutions matter for long-term development. Yet relatively little is known as to how to adopt good quality institutions and reform weak or poor institutions, for which one needs to know how institutions change. This paper provides a...

Township Village Enterprises (TVEs) have essentially contributed to China's economic development and institutional transformation over the last twenty years. One of the explanations for the mechanism of TVEs' growth is the co-operative culture theory which claims that Chinese - compared with...

This paper constitutes a component of a larger research project. The larger project attempts to address two issues in international relations - one substantive and theoretical, the second epistemological and ontological. The first issue, which will be the focus of this paper, considers the...

The interest in forests managed by communities has been increasing in recent decades, and it implied a relevant research agenda on community-based forest management institutions. This paper analyzes the process of institutional change, the property rights system and the governance mechanism in...

This paper develops the empirical and theoretical case that differences in economic institutions are the fundamental cause of differences in economic development. We first document the empirical importance of institutions by focusing on two “quasi-natural experiments” in history, the...