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AbstractThis essay explores China's experience with state ownership of business enterprise. After a short historical survey of the rise, fall, and re-emergence of the state-owned enterprise (SOE) as a form of business organization, the essay examines the creation, ownership structure, and role of SOEs under Chinese state capitalism. It further discusses the government's ongoing efforts to reform its SOEs. These efforts are illuminating because they highlight the serious tension inherent in the party-state's dual goals of maintaining SOEs as a tool for advancing non-financial social and industrial policy objectives, and addressing the corporate governance challenges of these enterprises. The essay concludes by examining implications from the preceding analysis—for China's domestic economy, for policy-makers outside China, and for the corporate form itself.

This Article examines three decades of Japanese experience with deposit insurance andfailing banks, and analyzes the implications of that experience for bank safety net reform in other countries. To date, the literature and policy debate on deposit insurance have been heavily colored by U.S. banking history and have focused almost exclusively on explicit deposit protection schemes. Analysis of Japan's safety net experience suggests that (a) deposit insurance, for all its flaws, is superior to the real-world alternative-implicit government protection of depositors and discretionary regulatory intervention in bank distress, (b) a well-designed explicit deposit insurance system that includes a credible bank closure policy is the starting point for the design of effective private alternatives to a government-run safety net, and (c) the trend toward greater institutionalization of the Japanese safety net-culminating in recent legislation to address the financial crisis-reflects increased political competition and greater emphasis on legal as opposed to reputational systems of economic ordering in that country