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In the 1980s and 1990s, privatisation has been widely adopted across the developing world and has reversed the previous trend towards the expansion of state enterprise. This thesis examines the establishment, operation and privatisation of the state enterprise sector in Zambia between 1968 and 1998. Following the economic reforms announced at Mulungushi (1968) and Matero Hall (1969), state enterprise came to dominate the economy. In 1990 a policy of limited privatisation was introduced which was subsequently extended to cover the entire state enterprise sector. By the end of 1998, this had resulted in the privatisation of the majority of state enterprises. The thesis examines the changing role of state enterprise from a political perspective, with the state analysed as the agent of policy choice and implementation. It examines the reasons for the growth in state enterprise, evaluates its performance and identifies the factors which prompted the adoption of privatisation and influenced its implementation. It argues that the growth of state enterprise was primarily a response to the inadequacies of the existing private sector in meeting the state's developmental objectives. However, the strategy pursued by the state enterprise sector proved to be commercially and financially unsustainable. To these problems were added pressure from creditors and donors for Zambia to adopt policies of market liberalisation. This resulted in the adoption of a strategy of comprehensive privatisation. The thesis examines how the choice of the method of privatisation of individual enterprises reflected the objectives of the government in undertaking the programme and the constraints under which it was implemented. The Zambian Government sought to promote competitive industrial structures, indigenous ownership and the viability of the enterprises involved in the process. It has, however, been constrained in this by a number of factors, including the existing legal rights of minority shareholders, the weak commercial and financial position of many state enterprises and the macro-economic environment in which the programme has been undertaken.

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The economic prosperity of a nation is a complex function of many factors, including its culture, geography, history, legal origins, ethnolinguistic fractionalization, resource endowment, leadership and religious homogeneity. However, economic prosperity is most robustly related to the quality of a nation’s institutions under which its resources are put to productive use. Institutions are the humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic and social interactions. Fundamental economic institutions, like property rights and the rule of law, structure the incentives that affect a nation’s productivity. Since at least the early 1990’s, economists have quantified economic institutions and policies by aggregating economic policy variables into economic indexes. Of these indexes, the most popular is the Economic Freedom of the World, which measures the consistency of a nation’s institutions with the principles of economic freedom. After decades of study, we know that economic freedom is positively related to income, gender equality, civil liberty and happiness among other desirable economic outcomes. Despite the benefits of simplifying institutions into a single number, the implicit assumptions required to do so are costly. By summarizing institutional quality as a single quantity, scholars assume that the underlying institutional structure of two economies are identical as long as their summary scores are identical. This assumption is often false, and this research examines the costs of this assumption for modeling economic growth. The common methodology for measuring institutional quality ignores both institutional volatility and institutional imbalance. This research shows that both measures are robustly and negatively related to economic growth rates. Therefore, models that simply a nation’s institutions to a single value at a single period of time are assuming away valuable information that helps explain a nation’s prosperity or lack thereof. In addition to examining the costs of these false assumptions, this research also examines the institutional trends among U.S. states since 1981. Despite declining economic freedom in the United States relative to other nations, state and local governments in the United States are liberalizing in recent decades. This phenomena is driven by increasing labor market freedom among states.

Based upon the view that changes in institutional environment have an effect on transaction attributes, which will make anew the choice of economic organization, the purpose of the thesis is to explain the organization development and structure change of Mainland China's non-state-owned enterprises. It tries to modify O. E. Williamson's theory of governance structure in order to theorize China's economy more suitably. More importantly, the thesis describes a specific dimension of transaction ¡Ðthe need for "political reliance" in the transitional economy, with which we supplement and/or on substitute Williamson's (1999) concept of "probity". We find out that the need for political reliance in stead of probity, is the key to understanding why and which kind of governance mechanism is more "efficient" in managing transaction in Mainland China's non-state-owned section. The theory we establish is applied to explaining the organization development and structure change of Mainland China's non-state-owned interprises, which have experienced different need of political reliance in different stages of China's economic reform. Especially suitable for the theory to explain is about the surge and fall of the unique form of organization, i.e. the so-called "Gua-kau"(±¾¾a) enterprises. The thesis also predicts the tendency of structure change in Mainland China's non-state-owned seitor by using the same theory.

Ghana and South Korea have experienced regime changes from politically closed regimes to liberal democracy since their independences from Britain and Japan. This study elaborates on important factors that affect regime shifts in both countries. After reviewing a vast array of literatures, I argue that economic reform and civil society directly influenced democratization in Ghana. Neo-liberal economic reform led by international forces created decentralization and social movements that gave pressures to President Jerry Rawlings to consider running for a democratic presidential election. Social movements from below directly caused the democratization in South Korea. The dictator Chun gave up his power in the face of massive demonstrations of students, labor, and oppositions and so on. Modernization indirectly contributed to democratization with social changes such as increasing level of education and urbanization in both countries. Political culture has affected democratic consolidation rather than democratic transition. / text