Corporate Governance and Economic Performance

What is the best corporate governance system? Is the Germanic corporate governance system the best? The Japanese? The Anglo-Saxon? This article reviews some of the relevant literature for answering this question. Particular attention is devoted to corporate governance problems in developing countries. It emphasizes that the nature of problems that corporate governance systems must deal with can be expected to vary with the state of development of a country. Central to any discussion of corporate governance is the question of how well a particular set of institutions mitigates the various principal/agent problems that arise in a firm. The article thus reviews the basic principal/agent problem and discusses its relevance for countries in different stages of development. It examines the advantages and disadvantages of each type of corporate governance system in mitigating principal/agent problems, and reviews the relevant empirical evidence for assessing their performance.