Purpose The purpose of this study is to investigate the interplay between economic governance and privatization, and how these two instruments affect the entry mode choice of the foreign firm and the social welfare of the host country. Design/methodology/approach This study constructs a mixed duopoly model wherein one domestic public firm competes with a foreign firm and investigates the influence of economic governance investment on the domestic government’s optimal degree of privatization choice and the foreign firm’s entry mode choice. Findings This study shows that (1) better economic governance enhances the effect of privatization on output, thus resulting in a lower degree of privatization; (2) the optimal privatization policy of the domestic government is partial privatization irrespective of the foreign firm’s entry mode choice; (3) with optimal investment by the domestic government on economic governance, the optimal degree of privatization is higher under FDI than export, and the host-country welfare is also higher under FDI. In particular, this study demonstrates that better economic governance decreases the threshold of the degree of privatization when the foreign firm switches from export to FDI, implying that better economic governance stimulates the foreign firm to undertake FDI in the host country. Practical implications The findings shed some light on both the mixed ownership reform of the SOEs in China and attracting foreign capital inflow to improve the host country’s social welfare. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study constitutes the first attempt to build a theoretical framework to explore how the interactions between economic governance and privatization influence the entry mode choice of the foreign firm.