ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the links from the evolution of primary institutions set out in the previous chapter (of property rights, of contract-enforcement institutions (CEIs), of coercion-constraining institutions (CCIs), and of state legal and fiscal capacity) to comparative corporate governance institutions that I term ‘meso-institutions’. At above a certain (undefined) level of economic development, once basic contract enforcement is viable, there arises the demand for public or larger-scale firms. 1 Connections need to be made between political and economic theories of the formation of primary institutions and legal theory on both the legal forms that business enterprise takes and how legal form relates to the forms of ownership – be it public or private ownership or be it publicly traded share ownership or privately held concentrated ownership.
