Prospects for Emerging-Market Flows Amid Investor Concerns about Corporate Governance

Concerns about corporate governance standards have often centred on emerging markets, notably after the 1997-98 Asian crisis. A series of corporate scandals have now raised investor concerns over the quality of earnings and opaque balance sheet structures in the US and other developed countries. The paper assesses the impact of higher risk on developed-country corporate assets on the prospects for private capital flows and their composition to emerging-market economies. While investors have been paying a higher premium (in terms of higher price/earning ratios and lower interest rates) for US assets partly because of the perceived superiority in the quality of their earnings reporting, one could expect a shift away from asset classes with rising risk to assets where risks were already high — emerging-market debt and equity, for example. Higher flows to emerging markets, however, can be impeded by the negative repercussion of lower asset prices in the developed markets on the real ...