We start our exploration of China’s institutional change by asking what the China experience can tell us about institutional economics and organization theory. We point to under-researched areas such as the formation of firms and the interplay between firms and local politics. Our findings...

The literature on transaction costs concentrates on established firms in established markets, while the literature on industrial ecology concentrates on new firms in given markets. It is contested in the following that the picture looks differently if the analysis concentrates on establishing...

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...