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This study explores configurations that promote the development of collective economies in China's rural villages and reveals the multiple development pathways that otherwise remain relatively unexamined in the literature.

The authors obtained first-hand representative case data from 20 villages in 12 counties in 5 provinces in East, West and Central China via fieldwork and applied fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to conduct a configurational comparative study of the development of village collective economies.

This paper identifies five factors in the current literature that affect the development of village collectives, based on an “entrepreneur–situation” analytical framework. Using the fsQCA method, this study further obtains two main configurations of conditions that culminate in the growth of rural collective economies in China. The first solution is the “top-down path”: When entrepreneurial leadership (EL), resource endowment (RE) and government assistance (GA) are present, a village collective economy will experience a high level of development, irrespective of policy support (PS) and villagers' participation (VP). The second solution is the “bottom-up path”: When EL, VP and PS are present and GA is not present, a village collective economy will experience a high level of development, irrespective of RE. In both situations, EL stands out as the core condition for the development of village collective economies, implying the need for the government to vigorously cultivate the entrepreneurial skills and aspirations of village cadres.

Taking a configurational perspective and using an fsQCA approach, this research constructs an “entrepreneur–situation” analytical framework to investigate the key combinations of factors and pathways involved in the high level of development of Chinese village collective economies.