Culture Tradition, Institution Performance And Path Dependence Of Shanxi Merchants

The function of culture background has been paid more attention to in modern economic theory of development. Culture background consisted of value and customs are becoming the key element of economic growth. In culture background,the pattern of value has great influences on the development of market economy。At the same time,every subject is inevitabley influenced by culture,culture affects the efficiency of economic growth by affecting agents way of thinking and behaving。When culture tradition becomes a social circumstance,it will form a interacting relation among social mumber,form certain exchange system and communication custom.This kind of exchange system and communication custom will guarantee the culture traditon to continue. Jenna Bednar and Scott E. Page of Michigan University characterize those bidirectional causalities formally. by providing a precise, formal, logically consistent model of how those effects operate they complement the many rich descriptive accounts about the relations of culture tradition, institution performance and path dependence.The commercial standing and financial standing of the Shanxi merchants during the Ming and Qing Dynasty had been famous in commercial circles and whole country.But Shanxi merchants gradually went felling with the change of society and economy environment.Its development embodied path dependence character.In this thesis, we firstly discuss the characteristic culture tradition of Shanxi merchants formed under the influence of Confucianism, secondly, the relation between culture traditon and formal institutions of Shanxi merchants,the institution performances and path dependence,thirdly, is the conclusion after analysis. The culture traditons involved in this thesis are credit, family and conservation traditons, and the formal institutions in this thesis refered to shareholding system , alliened shop , account sale and credit loan.Main structure of this thesis is below: Chapter One Introduction includies the meaning of this topic, basic train of thought, theoretical foundation, research method, innovation, main views and the structure arrangment of this thesis.Chapter Two discussed the characters of cluture and culture tradition,the releation among culture, institution performance and path dependence.Chapter Three discussed the origin of Shanxi merchants'culture tradition and its main characters.The main characters of Shanxi merchantsincluded credit system,collective spirit and conservative tradition.All these are accord with collective cultural traditions.Thus, they intended to choose self-restraint mechanism and collective punishment mechanism.Chapter Four discussed how the culture traditon affected institution choice and why Shanxi merchants choose shareholding system as an important formal institution, the insitutiton performance of sharehoiding system and its path dependence character. Chapter Five interprete the relation among Shanxi merchants'culture tradition, the performance of alliened shops institution and path dependence. Chapter Six interprete the relation among Shanxi merchants'culture tradition, the performance of institution of account sale and credit loan, and its path dependence character.Chapter Seven is some conclusions drawed from above analysis, firstly, the perfomance of forml institutions in Shanxi-merchants'firms indicates their path dependence character; secondly, the relations between Shanxi-merchants culture traditions and the perfomance of forml institutions; thirdly, apocalypseto our modern economy.