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Over a quarter of a century since the fall of the Berlin Wall, former communist regimes have transitioned to democratic or semi-democratic regimes, although the process of becoming market economies has advanced at different rates and directions across countries. Transition economies represent a large sub-category of emerging economies (Hoskisson, Eden, Lau, & Wright, 2000; Hoskisson, Wright, Filatotchev, & Peng, 2013). Given the 25 years since 1989, it is timely to review how means of state control have changed in these transition economies.

While developed economies have seen a gradual demise of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and there has been extensive privatization in emerging economies, state capitalism is a popular choice among transition economies (Wooldridge, 2012). Accordingly, we address the following research question:“Which forms of state control over corporations have emerged in countries that made a transition from centrally planned to marked-based economies and what are their implications for corporate governance?” To address this question, we suggest a taxonomy of state control used to structure our literature review.