Suchergebnisse

Interview data from China are used to test an argument that executives develop personal connections in societies with underdeveloped legal support for private businesses. In China, such connections are called guanxi. An underdeveloped legal framework makes private-company executives more dependent on guanxi than executives in state-owned or collective-hybrid companies. Compared to the other executives, private-company executives considered business connections more important, depended more on connections for protection, had more government connections, gave more unreciprocated gifts, and trusted their connections more.

This paper explores the relationship of the informal economy to the formal economy and to the formal regulatory environment. It begins with a comparison of the earlier concept of the 'informal sector' with the new expanded concept of the 'informal economy' which includes microentrepreneurs, own account operators, informal wage workers, and industrial outworkers. The central arguments of the paper are that (a) most informal enterprises and workers are intrinsically linked to formal firms; (b) different segments of the informal economy are overregulated, de-regulated, or under-regulated; and (c) there are benefits and costs to both formality and informality. The paper concludes that the appropriate role for government is (i) to ensure that the formal regulatory environment is not biased in favour of formal firms and workers over informal enterprises and workers (or vice versa) and (ii) to regulate the commercial and employment relationships between formal firms, informal enterprises, and informal wage workers.

Initially, attention to grey literature in the academic library was focused on external collections, documents produced by government agencies or research centers. Little, if any, systematic attention was paid to the grey literature that was produced on university campuses. The advent of the Web, while bringing more interest to grey literature in general did not change this situation much. However, the trend toward the creation of institutional repositories has caused a considerable shift in interest. The formalization of collecting, processing and integrating academic institutional gray literature should be critical to the University's mission, irrespective of format, and irrespective of the existence of an active institutional repository.This paper reviews an earlier-in-the-decade study of academic gray literature and provides an updated perspective.

Canada has experienced two formal federal ministries dedicated to addressing urban issues. The first, the Ministry of State for Urban Affairs, encountered resistance from provincial governments and its fellow departments. Both worked to undermine it. The second, the Ministry of State for Infrastructure and Communities, was created with a more conciliatory tone towards the provincial governments and its ministerial colleagues. This paper examines the establishment of both ministries and tracks their efforts using a policy learning and lesson-drawing framework, concluding that common institutional actors, such as the Privy Council, were responsible for the Ministry of State for Infrastructure and Communities' change in tone and approach to multilevel governance. General lessons are drawn about inter-governmental relations and multi-level policy formation in federal systems.

Canada has experienced two formal federal ministries dedicated to addressing urban issues. The first, the Ministry of State for Urban Affairs, encountered resistance from provincial governments and its fellow departments. Both worked to undermine it. The second, the Ministry of State for Infrastructure and Communities, was created with a more conciliatory tone towards the provincial governments and its ministerial colleagues. This paper examines the establishment of both ministries and tracks their efforts using a policy learning and lesson-drawing framework, concluding that common institutional actors, such as the Privy Council, were responsible for the Ministry of State for Infrastructure and Communities' change in tone and approach to multilevel governance. General lessons are drawn about inter-governmental relations and multi-level policy formation in federal systems.

Abstract
This paper introduces the concept of institutional resilience based on a population game. Agents in an economy are randomly matched to play a coordination game with two strategies, cooperate and defect. A breach of contract can be adjudicated in court. Agents can update their strategy, which is modelled using the replicator dynamic. In this context, cooperation is defined as the informal institution, whereas the legal system (contract law) constitutes the formal institution. Institutional resilience is defined by how the formal institution of a functioning legal system complements the informal institution of cooperation in a dynamic way. In the wake of an adverse exogenous shock, the formal institution can prevent a total breakdown of cooperation in the population.

Applying institutional theory to look at the Program 74 (a universal service policy) in Vietnam, this paper concludes that the Vietnamese universal service policy was strongly affected by formal institutional factors (the international agreements and the directives of the Communist Party of Vietnam - CPV), in which the international agreements played a leading role and the CPV's directives played a guarantee role. The formulation and implementation of the universal service policy in Vietnam were mainly concentrated on action at levels 2 and 3 (formal and informal institutional arrangement, and formal institutional environment). The paper recommends that nations favouring a top-down approach not based on a market-oriented regime should deregulate and emphasize the role of provincial governments as well as encourage private sectors/social organizations and rural users to be more involved in the formulation and implementation of universal service policies. Moreover, the government should set up and force the contractual relations between governmental entities and telecom providers.

AbstractColonial institutions are thought to be highly persistent, but measuring that persistence is difficult. Using a text analysis method that allows us to measure similarity between bodies of text, we examine the extent to which one formal institution – the penal code – has retained colonial language in seven West African countries. We find that the contemporary penal codes of most countries retain little colonial language. Additionally, we find that it is not meaningful to speak of institutional divergence across the unit of French West Africa, as there is wide variation in the legislative post-coloniality of individual countries. We present preliminary analyses explaining this variation and show that the amount of time that a colony spent under colonisation correlates with more persistent colonial institutions.

Our study explores the effect of institutions in determining the prevalence of formal entrepreneurship and investigates the entrepreneurial choice in response to these institutions. To pursue the objectives of the study, we utilized eleven years of data from 23 countries of the Asian region. As explanatory variables, entry regulations were taken as a proxy measure of formal institutions; whereas, social capital was considered a proxy measure of informal institutions. Based on the nature of data, we applied a pooled OLS regression model to examine the influence of explanatory variables on the entrepreneurial choice. The findings proclaimed that at an individual level, both formal and informal institutions have a negative effect on entry into formal entrepreneurship. Further, the estimations of the interaction terms revealed the existence of asymmetry between formal and informal institutions regarding that negative influence on entry into formal entrepreneurship.