Since the global financial crisis of 2008-2009, there has been a growing interest among policy makers towards the more active role of the state in the enterprise sector. This book provides valuable insight into the changing role of state-owned enterprises in economic policy, a topic at the cross section of several interrelated, but usually independent research streams first of all transition research, varieties of capitalism literature, public choice approach and institutionalism studies. With the existing literature on state ownership concentrating on the developed economies and on selected emerging economies, this book fills an important gap in focusing on the post-communist transition countries. The Polish experience is looked at in a comparative perspective of selected transition countries, which deserve special attention as they had to cope with a radical change of their economic policies towards the enterprise sector. This book will be valuable reading for academics in economic policy, transition economics, and institutional economics, and policy makers and practitioners in EU bodies and emerging economies.

Why does corporate governance--front page news with the collapse of Enron, WorldCom, and Parmalat--vary so dramatically around the world? This book explains how politics shapes corporate governance--how managers, shareholders, and workers jockey for advantage in setting the rules by which companies are run, and for whom they are run. It combines a clear theoretical model on this political interaction, with statistical evidence from thirty-nine countries of Europe, Asia, Africa, and North and South America and detailed narratives of country cases. This book differs sharply from most treatments by explaining differences in minority shareholder protections and ownership concentration among countries in terms of the interaction of economic preferences and political institutions. It explores in particular the crucial role of pension plans and financial intermediaries in shaping political preferences for different rules of corporate governance. The countries examined sort into two distinct groups: diffuse shareholding by external investors who pick a board that monitors the managers, and concentrated blockholding by insiders who monitor managers directly. Examining the political coalitions that form among or across management, owners, and workers, the authors find that certain coalitions encourage policies that promote diffuse shareholding, while other coalitions yield blockholding-oriented policies. Political institutions influence the probability of one coalition defeating another.

With the increasing awareness that mere economic and production-based explanations do not adequately describe the motivations for governance, researchers have focused on the behavioral side of the firm performance to justify the economic rationale of their typical behaviours. This book describes the concept of corporate governance, its emergence and the contemporary thinking around it. With emphasis on "conflicts of interests" assumed to be related to the theory of separation of ownership and control, the book delves into topics such as insider trading, excessive executive compensation, managerial, expropriation of shareholders’ wealth, false reporting, accounting non-disclosures and self dealing.

Comprehensive and up-to-date, this important textbook analyzes the escalating crisis in corporate governance and the growing interest in its reform across the globe. Written by a leading name in the field of corporate governance from a genuinely international perspective, this excellent textbook provides a balanced analysis of the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Anglo-Saxon, European and Asian traditions of corporate governance; offering a prognosis of the future development, complexity and diversity of corporate governance forms and systems. It: investigates the reasons for the failure of Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, Parmalat and other major international corporations examines the role of international standards of corporate governance, with the intervention of the OECD, World Bank and IMF explores the continuing cultural diversity in corporate and institutional forms in the United States and UK, Europe and Asia Pacific. Illustrated with a wealth of up-to-the minute case studies and packed full of excellent illustrative material that guides student readers through this complex subject, International Corporate Governance is a must read for anyone studying corporate governance today.

This book examines the development of big business in Russia since the onset of market oriented reform in the early 1990s. It explains how privatized post-Soviet enterprises, many of which made little sense as business units, were transformed into functional firms able to operate in the environment of a market economy. It provides detailed case studies of three key companies – Yukos Oil Company, Siberian (Russian) Aluminium and Norilsk Nickel – all of which played a key role in Russia’s economic recovery after 1998, describing how these companies were created, run and have developed. It shows how Russian businesses during the 1990s routinely relied on practices not entirely compatible with formal rules, in particular in the area of corporate governance. The book fully explores the critical role played by informal corporate governance practices - such as share dilution, transfer pricing, asset stripping, limiting shareholders access to votes, and 'bankruptcy to order’ - as Russian big business developed during the 1990s. Unlike other studies on Russian corporate governance, this book highlights the ambiguous impact of informal corporate governance practices on the companies involved as commercial entities, and suggests that although their use proved costly to Russia’s business reputation, they helped core groups of owners/managers at the time to establish coherent business firms. Overall, the book shows that we cannot understand the nature of current economic changes in Russia without recognising the crucial role played by informal corporate governance practices in the creation and development of big business in post-Soviet Russia.

In today’s globalized and competitive business environment, companies increasingly look to restructuring, mergers & acquisitions and downsizing to survive, grow and maximize profits. However, when they are not managed in a socially responsible manner, restructurings may exert the negative impact on employees, shareholders, communities, and society as a whole. The book empirically explores the phenomena of corporate social responsibility (CSR), restructuring, and relationships with firms’ performance in China. It gives an insight into how Chinese firms respond to expectations of stakeholders by making social goals a part of their overall business operations. It also gives a fresh view of the new concept of socially responsible restructuring. For those seeking to promote socially responsible practices in restructuring, the book provides a unique and stimulating analysis and touchstone.

This ambitious volume explores the politics of recent changes in corporate governance regulation and the transnational forces driving the process. Corporate governance has in the 1990s become a catchphrase of the global business community. The Enron collapse and other recent corporate scandals, as well as growing worries in Europe about the rise of Anglo-Saxon finance, have made issues of corporate governance the subject of political controversies and of public debate. The contributors argue that the regulation of corporate governance is an inherently political affair. Given the context of the deepening globalization of the corporate world, it is also increasingly a transnational phenomenon. In terms of the content of regulation the book shows an increasing reliance on the application of market mechanisms and a tendency for corporations themselves to become commodities. The emerging new mode of regulation is characterized by increasing informalization and by forms of private regulation. These changes in content and mode are driven by transnational actors, first of all the owners of internationally mobile financial capital and their functionaries such as coordination service firms, as well as by key public international agencies such as the European Commission. The Transnational Politics of Corporate Governance Regulation will be of interest to students and researchers of international political economy, politics, economics and corporate governance.

"This book goes back to a symposium held at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign Private and Private International Law in Hamburg on May 15-17 1997"--P. [v].