OECD Working Papers

Corporate governance matters for national development. Case studies of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, India, Malaysia and South Africa suggest that it has a role of growing importance to play in helping to increase the flow of financial capital to firms in developing countries. Equally important are the potential benefits of improved corporate governance for overcoming barriers, including the actions of vested interest groups, to achieving sustained productivity growth. Improved corporate governance, however, cannot be considered in isolation. In the financial sector, attention must also be given to measures to strengthen the banking sector, and a country’s financial institutions as a whole. In the “real” sector, close attention must be given to competition policy and sector–specific regulatory reform. Forces working in favour of improved corporate governance in developing countries include those operating both on the demand and on the supply side of domestic and international portfolio equity flows to corporations in those countries. Forces working against significantly improved corporate governance (which may nonetheless give lip service to the need for such improvement) include many dominant shareholders and other corporate insiders — in the private and public sectors — in entrenched distributional cartels. The heightened risk of regulatory capture in countries with clientelistic relationship–based (as opposed to rules–based) systems of governance reinforces the fact that good corporate governance requires good political governance, and vice–versa.