ABSTRACT
Cycles of crisis and reform in corporate governance are becoming a worldwide phenomenon. Contemporary concerns, originating in market and corporate failures in the United States and United Kingdom, have extended to Europe, the Asia Pacific, and beyond. The vital significance of corporate governance for accountability and performance is now fully recognised in the industrial world, and perhaps even more acutely in the transitional economies of Eastern Europe, East Asia and Latin America. What used to occur quietly behind closed boardroom doors is now a matter of considerable public interest. Successive recent controversies have highlighted some of the dilemmas of corporate governance, but since the origins of industry there were deep apprehensions regarding the ownership and control of businesses ‘Corporate governance has only recently emerged as a discipline in its own right, although the strands of political economy it embraces stretch back through centuries’ (World Bank 2000: 1).
