USYD China Studies Centre
1:00 pm – 2:00 pm, Wed. 28 February 2018
Tutorial Room 332, Old Teachers College, University of Sydney (map)
With China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the Belt economies along the old Silk Road are suddenly attracting global attention. The big question is, will Chinese support enable these economies to link China and Europe by building the institutions that will make them active contributors to the economic flows across the Eurasian continent or will they act as simple conduits for energy resources, industrial goods and services.
Empirical research on this question is almost non-existing. One reason for this is that the BRI countries show highly diverse features such as the role of post-socialist elites, clans or Islamic economics which are hard to reconcile with standard economic theories.
We introduce a procedure linking theory with practical measurement tools used in country risk studies by which this deficit in research can be overcome. Our empirical findings focusing on three Arab economies show that their business systems differ widely on a number of criteria. We suggest that our methodology can be applied to all BRI economies as a tool to assess their compatibility with developed economies competing with China for economic influence along the new Silk Road.
Speaker
Professor Barbara Krug is Visiting Fellow of The Interdisciplinary Centre for East Asian Studies (IZO) and Senior Professor at the Faculty of Linguistics, Cultures, and Arts at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. From 1996 to 2015 she was professor of economics of governance at the Department of Organisation and Personnel Management, Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (RSM).
Professor Krug’s special field of interest is the Chinese economy. Her empirical research examines long-term business relations in transition economies, situations of high uncertainty in the nascent private business sector in China and the emergence and survivability of Chinese firms.
Professor Krug’s major contribution to organisation theory lies in the area of governance, entrepreneurship and comparative business environments and her application of transaction cost economics, public choice and contract theory to explaining the nature of firms, emergence of entrepreneurship and the interrelationship between norms, customs and business routines.