Public Sector Entrepreneurship and 21 Century Development: Some Lessons from China

Abstract： 

Teaching and research in business schools embrace almost exclusively the private entrepreneurship. The intellectual background of it is neoclassic economics and its associated liberalism that dominates the broader intellectual landscape of the West and the rest of the world. Clearly specified and secure private property rights are the cornerstone of economic prosperity because they are the premise of private initiatives in the marketplace.

Entering the 21st Century, however, knowledge and the technologies derivative from it have become the most important capital of economic growth. Public sector entrepreneurship is no longer exclusively about the production and provision of public goods. The inherent properties of the “cognitive capital” have opened up additional spaces for public sector entrepreneurship. The heightened struggle over intellectual property rights in the China-US trade war, the rise of state capitalism, the competition for human resources etc. are all indicators of its rising importance. This seminar is a preliminary report of a book manuscript the speaker is working on. We will examine the types of public sector entrepreneurship, highlight their respective characteristics in contrast to private entrepreneurship and sort out the policy implications.

Speaker Biography：

Lance Gore (郭良平)is Senior Research Fellow at the East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore. His research interests span a wide range of topics on China and East Asia. He has done research and published on Chinese environmental politics (the “Green GDP” experiment), the reforms in China’s steel industry, energy sector, patterns of entrepreneurship in mainland China, the economic bureaucracies of China, cadre performance evaluation, local state economic behaviour, the Chinese Communist Party, industrial relations, elite politics and the People’s Liberation Army. He taught for many years courses on the Politics and Societies in Southeast Asia, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, Contemporary Chinese Politics, Chinese Foreign Policy and International Political Economy at Bowdoin College and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University in the United States. He is the single author of three monographs: Chinese Communist Party and China’s Capitalist Revolution: the Political Impact of Market (Routledge); Market Communism: the Institutional Foundations of China’s Post-Mao Hyper-Growth (Oxford); and Chinese Politics Illustrated: the Cultural, Social and Historical Contexts (World Scientific). He also published widely in international journals such as The New Political Economy, Polity,The China Journal, East Asia: An International Quarterly, Problems of Post-Communism, Chinese Journal of Comparative Law. He also edited several books and contributed numerous book chapters.