如何管理企业对企业协议：让数据说话

Peter Grajzl, Nona Karalashvili, Peter Murrell, and Domenico Viganola*T use to manage supplier agreements—so-called transactional governance structures (TGSs)—from more than17,000 firms across 13 countries. Five distinct and meaningful types of TGSs emerge from the data.Cross-country patterns confirm strong association between the rule of law and firms’ governance of supplieragreements. Strikingly, within-country variation in TGSs is substantial and can rival cross-country variations,pointing to transactional governance as an overlooked factor in uneven regional development. Firm-levelevidence suggests that institutional environments matter most for newer firms and less-experienced managers,with broader implications for productivity and economic development.Public Disclosure Authorized Empiricalevidence on how firms governsupplier agreements remains limited ThisBrief builds on that foundation,drawing oninterviews with managers and owners of more than 17,000firms across 13 countries, incorporating additional data andrefined estimation methods (refer to box 1). How do firms structure workable, productive agreementswiththeir suppliers?How much do they rely on thesurroundinginstitutional and business environment tosecure fulfillment of their agreements? And how do theanswers to these questions vary across and within countries?The combinations of mechanisms that firms use to governhow agreements are formed, carried out, enforced, andadapted are known as transactional governance structures Fivedistinct patterns of governance ofsupplier agreements emerge from the data The analysis identifies five distinct ways firms govern theirsupplier agreements, ranging from reliance on personalrelationships alone to full use of all available enforcementmechanisms.Thesepatternsmapcloselyontowell-establishedtheoretical archetypes.This result isreassuring given that the classification was driven entirely by Multiple theoretical perspectives emphasize the role ofcredibleenforcement in enabling efficient exchange,including transaction cost economics (Williamson 1979,1985); property rights theory (Grossman and Hart 1986;Hart and Moore 1990); institutional analysis (North 1990);andrelational contracting(Baker et al.2002).Yetcross-country empirical evidence on TGSs has remainedscarce,hampered by the lack of comprehensive and 1.Weak Bilateralism—Firms rely solely on personal trustand mutual interest to secure agreements, but even theseprovide limited assurance.2.Strong Bilateralism—Firms again rely exclusively on trustand mutual interest, but these are deemed effective.3.Bilateralism Plus—Firms supplement personal relationshipswith paid private dispute resolution and the legal system. *Affiliations:Peter Grajzl (Washington and Lee University, CESifo); Peter Murrell (University of Maryland, College Park); Nona Karalashvili and Domenico Viganola (World Bank,Policy Indicators Group, Development Economies). For correspondence: nkaralashvili@worldbank.org.Acknowledgements:Data collection was made possible through the Knowledge for Change Program IV of the World Bank Group, which is funded by the SwedishInternational Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), Agence Française de Développement (AFD)–French Development Agency, the Government of Japan, and the EuropeanUnion. This support is gratefully acknowledged. Nancy Morrison provided editorial assistance.Objective and disclaimer:Policy Indicators Briefs synthesize existing research and data to shed light on a useful and interesting question for policy debate. Policy IndicatorsBriefs carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarilyrepresent the views of the World Bank Group, its Executive Directors. Generative AI was used to assist with writing this Brief. The authors conducted the final editing and takefull responsibility for the content. All Briefs in the series can be accessed at https://www.worldbank.org/en/research/brief/global-indicators-briefs-serieshttps://www.worldbank.org/en/research/brief/global-indicators-briefs-seriesPublic Disclosure Authorized The data and estimation approach for the analysis Box 1 The survey question covers six theoretically grounded enforcement mechanisms spanning first-party, second-party,and third-party enforcement: personal trust, mutual business interest, paid private dispute resolution, governmentofficial assistance, other third-party intervention, and the legal system. This sequencing reflects a continuum of optionsranging from the personal to the formal institutional. Managers and owners of businesses are surveyed and asked to ratethe effectiveness of each mechanism in preventing and resolving supplier agreement problems on a Likert scale from "not Firms’ response patterns are analyzed through unsupervised machine learning—specifically Latent Class Analysis(LCA)—which sorts firms into distinct governance types, without imp