From Click to Boom: The Political Economy of E-commerce in China
(Hardback)
Available Formats
Publishing Details
From Click to Boom: The Political Economy of E-commerce in China
By (Author) Lizhi Liu
Princeton University Press
Princeton University Press
19th February 2025
United States
Classifications
Tertiary Education
Non Fiction
E-commerce: business aspects
338.951
Physical Properties
Hardback
328
Width 156mm, Height 235mm
Description
How the worlds largest e-commerce market highlights a digital path to development
How do states build vital institutions for market development Too often, governments confront technical or political barriers to providing the rule of law, contract enforcement, and loan access. In From Click to Boom, Lizhi Liu suggests a digital solution: governments strategically outsourcing tasks of institutional development and enforcement to digital platformsa process she calls institutional outsourcing.
Chinas e-commerce boom showcases this digital path to development. In merely two decades, China built from scratch a two-trillion-dollar e-commerce market, with 800 million users, seventy million jobs, and nearly fifty percent of global online retail sales. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Liu argues, this market boom occurred because of weak government institutions, not despite them. Gaps in government institutions compelled e-commerce platforms to build powerful private institutions for contract enforcement, fraud detection, and dispute resolution. For a surprisingly long period, the authoritarian government acquiesced, endorsed, and even partnered with this private institutional building despite its disruptive nature. Drawing on a plethora of interviews, original surveys, proprietary data, and a field experiment, Liu shows that the resulting e-commerce boom had far-reaching effects on China.
Institutional outsourcing nonetheless harbors its own challenges. With inadequate regulation, platforms may abuse market power, while excessive regulation stifles institutional innovation. Chinas regulatory oscillations toward platformsfrom laissez-faire to crackdown and back to supportunderscore the struggle to strike the right balance.
Author Bio
Lizhi Liu is assistant professor at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University, where she is also a faculty affiliate of the Department of Government. She is a Poets&Quants Top 50 Undergraduate Business Professor of 2021.
