This chapter shows that state-owned enterprises (SOEs) still play a major role within the Chinese corporate ecosystem, but even after a long period of reforms, they are still plagued by skewed government incentives leading to irrational investment decisions, huge waste of resources, and widespread defiance of central government regulations. The chapter includes case studies of the coal and power sectors to demonstrate the unholy "tripartite" relationship among SOEs, local government officials, and corrupt central regulators, all engaging in rent-seeking activities in their own vested interests. Current reform programs fail to address these key defects.

Financial crisis could play a key role in changing the policy equilibrium concerning financial markets and institutions. Using a recent comprehensive dataset on financial liberalization across ninety-four countries for the period between 1973 and 2015, we formally test the validity of this prediction for the member states of the European Union as well as a global sample. We contribute by (a) using a new up-to-date dataset of reforms and crises and (b) subjecting it to a combination of difference-in-differences and local projection estimations. In the global sample, our findings on the causal relationship between crises and liberal reforms consistently point out a negative direction between the two, suggesting that governments react to crises by intervening in financial markets. However, in a dynamic setting with impulse responses, we also illustrate that such interventions are only temporary and liberalization process restarts after a financial crisis. In the EU sample, however, we do not find sufficient evidence to support either of these observations.

It has long been argued that structural reforms constitute a remedy for getting countries out of the low-growth environment that Europe has experienced in the last decade. Many recent studies show long-term benefits of such reforms in cross-country settings, but ignore the heterogeneity across different country experiences. To address this gap in the context of the European Union, we focus on the largest early reforms that its four members (Denmark, France, Greece and Portugal) adopted in financial and labour markets. By using a Synthetic Control Method, we find that many of these early reform episodes do not seem to have been as fruitful as their advocates claimed at the time. Our results indicate a rather mixed relationship between reforms and several macro measures, including economic growth and inequality. Reforms, especially when introduced all at once as a big-bang, do not seem to always produce the intended results.