ABSTRACT
The aim of this book is to show how far a set of institutions and relationships, which we call corporate governance, together with a closely related set, which we call finance, can go to explain the technological advantage of nations. Corporate governance we will define simply as who controls firms, and how – although that begs many questions, which will be answered later in this chapter and in Chapter 3. Finance is probably clear enough for the moment. The technological advantage of nations, we will dwell on now. The phrase recalls Michael Porter’s book on The Competitive Advantage of Nations, as it was intended to. Porter asked, as we ask, why does one country do better in industry A and another in industry B? And why do some do better overall? But we refer to technological advantage.
