A taxonomy of Corporate Governance systems - an alternative approach

The aim of the paper is to review existing taxonomies of national Corporate Governance systems and to present an alternative classification approach using World Economic Forum indexes. In contrast to former concepts, the presented taxonomy classifies 114 economies and is based on quantitative variables. The analysis covers data published for the period of 2005-2011, referring to institutional framework quality and financial market development assessments. The authors verify the hypothesis that a strong institutional framework supports financial market development in a country and therefore the classification of its Corporate Governance system to one of the defined models: autonomous, market-oriented, mixed or institutional should rely on relative financial market assessment measures. The individual fixed effects estimated in a panel model of institutional framework and financial market development dependency create a new classification criteria.