ABSTRACT
This chapter’s central purpose is to examine how our 11 economies vary in terms of corporate governance and finance. To repeat: we understand corporate governance in a very broad sense, as who controls and influences firms, and how. This means that various aspects of firms’ relationships with the state and their employees will be treated as relevant. We are thus dealing very much with what some authors have called ‘varieties of capitalism’. In a sense we shall be seeking to characterise national systems of corporate governance and finance, but we must stress that our concern is always with the situation of the individual firm. We shall find it convenient at certain points to give one label to a country’s whole economy, but this will always be an approximation that conceals variations among that country’s firms. At other points we shall distinguish types of firm and indicate the rough proportions of each type in a particular economy.
