We present an institutional comparison of 13 major Asian business systems — China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam — with one another and five major Western economies — France, Germany, Sweden, UK, USA. We...

Efforts to build a universal theory of the world's business systems require empirical grounding in an understanding of the variety that need explaining. To support such theorizing, we analyzed the institutional structures of 61 major economies, accounting for 93.5% of 2013 world GDP at...