The rapidly evolving world of global business provides significant opportunities to do cross-national research in this arena. The economies of Asia are all historically characterized to a significant extent by a network form of capitalism. Yet, the development (and evolution) of institutions has proceeded significantly and rapidly in several of these nations. Clearly, the changing nature of global business provides a natural experiment to understand the consequences of firm behaviour upon network structure and evolution, as also a powerful practical reason for us to explore issues of network dynamics. This serendipitous co-emergence of both theoretical and practical significance suggests that the time may be right for the next push in research on the interface between governance and institutions.
While it would be unsurprising to suggest that governance varies across institutional contexts, understanding how and why institutions emerge, involve and change and their impact on business enterprises are less self-evident. For instance, business groups in many emerging economies have often been argued to be a form of governance structure that fills institutional voids enabling economic activity. Yet, most institutions in societies are themselves evolving, and it is likely that institutional voids are filled by the emergence of new institutions or the strengthening of old ones. If so, are groups then redundant, their constraint costs now exceeding their opportunity benefits? Under what circumstances might this be so?
In addition to the important theoretical and practical reasons for drawing attention to the interface between governance and institutions, there is also a salient methodological reason. To the extent that changes in the institutions emerge as a consequence of motivated actors driving those changes, it becomes important to control for the econometric implications of institutional change, even to obtain accurate estimates of the institution’s effects on governance and performance. Modelling this endogeneity and assessing its role in driving existing results on institutional effects provides an opportunity for advancing our understanding how governance structures and institutions co-evolve over time.
Given broad interest in good governance and our existing accomplishments in this area, it is compelling that we should leverage up our strengths to build a large-scale research program. This would bring international visibility to our efforts and increase our impact on scholarship and policy.The research will be carried out by multi-disciplinary teams, using empirical and theoretical methods.
The NUS Research Program on Organizations, Governance and Institutions (POGI) aims to build a large-scale research program focusing on the interface between institutions and organizations.
In the first three years, the objective of POGI is to build capability and increase collaboration among the faculty participants and with external institutions, with the view to preparing a Tier-2 grant proposal in the next three to five years.
Following that in the medium to long run, we envisage POGI to yield the following deliverables.
- Scholarly output in books, journals, conferences;
- Regular academic seminar with presentations by well-reputed guest speakers as well as program members;
- New mini-courses focusing on governance at the BBA and MBA levels;
- Policy contribution to World Bank, Asian Development Bank, and through the Singapore Cooperation Program of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Business impact through consultation and advice
- Role of intellectual property rights, political rights, and civil liberties in innovation and economic growth.
- Impact of corporate legal and regulatory framework on firm behaviour and performance.
- Role of business groups in emerging market countries.
- Impact of institutions in individual countries-in addressing a common environmental shock, e.g., global financial crisis.
- Evolution of institutions with interactions among individual actors and governments.