Comparative Corporate Governance in Emerging Markets

This review essay seeks to provide an overview of the state of the art of corporate governance (CG) in emerging markets (EMs). We focus mostly on the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and adopt a systematic cross-national comparative focus. The chapter has four main sections. We begin by highlighting why it is important to better understand CG in EMs and to identify some of the key challenges these countries face as they seek to enhance their CG. Second, our review of managerial research conducted after the year 2000 on CG in emerging markets falls into four categories: ownership, boards of directors, top management teams, and CG practices and reform. We discuss the main research questions and findings from this collective body of work. It is noteworthy how “siloed” this research has been in terms of drawing few cross-national comparisons. In our third section, we seek to offer an overview of the main CG features of each of these BRIC countries relative to the others, taking on the OECD Guidelines of CG as our benchmark framework. To do so, we first address core governance areas related to the overall model of CG, ownership types and ownership rights, information disclosure and reporting, and stakeholder management and corporate social responsibility. Our concluding section highlights the main common themes for CG in emerging markets and suggests fruitful areas of future research