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This chapter on Singaporean business groups illustrates a fine example of a situation where business groups are run by the state. The government created large government-linked corporate groups to spearhead development in many sectors. Government-linked corporations have generally been managed effectively and run like private businesses, with a focus on financial performance. Private businesses run by the ethnic Chinese were left alone, and have competed with the government-linked corporations in many areas. When the Asian Crisis occurred, the government realized that it needed to restructure its financial sector and strengthen its corporate laws and accountancy practices. It pressured government-linked corporations and private banks to globalize, divest their non-core assets, and professionalize their governance. It also began monitoring banks’ performance more vigorously. Yet, the pace of divestment by both government-linked groups and banking groups has been thus far gradual.

This chapter summarizes major findings from each individual chapter and draws conclusions about the future of business groups in East Asia. First, despite the hardship accompanied with the crisis, business groups in East Asia remained quite intact, showing amazing robustness against external shocks from financial crises. Second, business groups in each country took a very divergent development path in response to the common shock of the Asian Crisis. Third, several countries undertook some changes in their institutional environments following the crisis such as enhancing corporate governance systems and tightening capital market supervision, which would have a much longer-term influence on the business groups in this region. This chapter argues that business groups in East Asia should reconfigure their business structures and adjust their corporate governance systems to regain momentum for further growth.

This chapter examines the restructuring of Japanese business groups during the 1990s. Using the Basic Survey of Business Structure and Activity, the chapter analyses the business portfolio of Japanese firms from the perspective of the group structure of parent and affiliate. While previous studies have examined the net shift in diversification or specialization of business, the chapter also adopts an original approach by looking at the actual flow of entry and exit from business segments. The analysis demonstrates that Japanese business groups engaged in a high level of restructuring during the 1990s, and a growing preference to separate businesses into subsidiaries and affiliated firms rather than managing them in house. Although Japanese firms have no trend toward greater diversification or greater focus on aggregate, entry and exit are important complementary strategies that improve firms.

Conventional economic and management theories explain that business groups facing market-liberalization policy reforms (i.e., competitive shocks) would have incentives to reduce corporate portfolios and increase internationalization. This chapter empirically examines the strategic responses of Argentine Business Groups and, through an inductive theory building process, proposes refinements to this theory. It argues that such strategy process is moderated by not only differences in market forces set out by policy reforms across different economic segments, but also by the path dependency of resources and capabilities as well as management decision making style of individual business groups. The implications for theory and practice are discussed.

This chapter shows how British trading companies built extensive and complex business groups to facilitate diversification. They employed a variety of institutional and contractual modes—including contracts, equity, debt, cross‐directorships, and repeated trading transactions—and inside them, there were flows of managerial, financial, and trading information and relationships. The network‐style business groups contained multiple conflicts of interest, but rent‐seeking behaviour was constrained, and they had some positive benefits.

This chapter presents a theoretical framework that analyzes how differences in the lobbying strategies of business interest groups emerge from differences in their legislative institutions, establishes the link between these institutionally inspired lobbying strategies and patterns of corrupt behaviors, and analyzes which of these patterns is more likely to lead to higher political and general corruption. It argues that countries with legislative institutions that incentivize lobbying directed at political parties will experience higher corruption than those countries that incentivize lobbying directed at individual legislators. This is the central hypothesis of this book.

This chapter examines the diversification of British trading companies into foreign direct investment in natural resources, manufacturing, and other activities between 1870 and 1914. They built on knowledge and contacts within their host economies to create diversified business groups. There were considerable inter‐firm differences in performance, but profitability was often high.

This chapter summarizes stylized facts on corporate ownership and control structures around the world and their impact on managerial decisions and firm performance. Recent literature suggests that family control and pyramidal business groups are the two distinct organizational characteristics prevalent outside the United States and the United Kingdom. An important explanatory factor is the quality of investor protection, which determines the degree of private benefit extraction by the controlling party. Pyramidal business groups extend the boundaries of a firm beyond a single legal entity, raising challenges in disentangling group-level effect from other firm-level factors.

This chapter features a case study of the emergence of the cellular phone industry in Moscow and St. Petersburg. These are local stories about how fragments of the old Communist state—in particular traditional telecoms and a military research lab, both of which had highly qualified engineers—mostly successfully reached out to foreign partners to jointly found six new cellular companies. These are the types of stories that Gorbachev promised but too rarely delivered. This chapter confirms the basic message of the previous chapter that “market formation” in post-Communist Russia was not the spontaneous invisible hand of Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek but instead was the visible-hand emergence of business alliances and groups.

This chapter argues that the political rights enjoyed by all U.S. citizens are used disproportionately by the better organized and better established. It explains why America has taken halting and ineffective steps to protect the health of its citizens and argues that business and interest groups wield disproportional power, the less advantaged do not participate, and workers are poorly organized. Medicare is a tribute to the powerful impact of the government in improving the lives and health of Americans; however, it is also a testament to the limitations of government actions owing to the disproportionate influence of the organized and better established.

This chapter examines the impact of economic liberalization on business ownership networks in six major emerging economies which include Brazil, Chile, Israel, Mexico, South Korea, and Taiwan. It describes the institutional differences in these countries and analyzes the effect of these differences on the local structure of ownership networks and the configuration of business groups. It also provides data on the specific impact of liberalization on centralization of governance, directors’ networks, and potential implications for competitiveness.

This chapter examines the historical origins, evolutionary paths, and long-term resilience of diversified business groups in the economies of Western Europe, North America, and Oceania from the nineteenth century to the present. In examining the developmental dynamics of diversified business groups in those economies, it aims to propose a new interpretation of the long-term evolution of large business enterprises in different market and institutional settings. The chapter suggests that diversified business groups are not simply transitional and second-best organizations that worked well only at the early phase of modern economic growth and will not necessarily become an obstacle for dynamic industrial development as the economies mature. Instead, as the business groups flexibly co-evolve with changing market and institutional environments, they can stay on as a viable model for business organizations even in developed markets.

This chapter analyzes the prevalence of business groups in Sweden. The Swedish economy has since the early twentieth century been dominated by a rather small number of large and internationally oriented companies. The relations between banks and industry have been important in understanding the long-term growth of the Swedish economy. Two business groups—the Wallenberg group and the Handelsbanken group—stand out as especially resilient and dynamic. The Wallenberg and Handelsbanken groups have both developed into diversified business groups with a commercial bank in the center of each. The successful Swedish business groups have also to some extent been dependent on indirect support from the Swedish state, allowing the large groups to maintain their dominant position.

Business groups emerged in Portugal in the late nineteenth century amid nascent industrialization and revealing strong ties to colonial business. Economic nationalism, corporatism, and the decreasing importance of colonies nurtured different business groups in the aftermath of the Great Depression: increasingly diversified while oriented to the domestic market; inward-looking and with large capital shares in affiliate firms; internalizing corporate finance in intra-group capital flows. Everything changed dramatically in 1975, when large industrial and financial groups were nationalized. When they re-emerged twenty years later, they had metamorphosed into a different species: more focused, yet still with unrelated product portfolios; transmuted into multinationals active overseas; organized in pyramidal structures that magnify their control rights; and employed financing based on capital markets and intermediation. The quasi-experimental situation created by the 1975 nationalization emphasizes the importance of flexibility in adapting strategy and control structures to different economic and institutional contexts.

While business groups are a dominant and critical business organization in contemporary emerging economies and have lately attracted much attention in academic circles and business presses, interestingly their counterparts in developed economies have not been systematically examined. This chapter serves as an introduction to this volume that examines the origins, evolution, and resilience of business groups in the developed economies of Western Europe, North America and Oceania. First, it describes the major aims of the volume and argues why it focuses on business groups in developed economies. Second, it examines the categorical classifications of various types of business groups, as conceptual clarification is necessary to distinguish different varieties of this organizational model at the outset of the volume. Third, the chapter explores the varieties of diversified business groups and their comparable organizational models under the category of “multi-unit enterprises.” It concludes by giving an outline of the entire volume.