Internal governance mechanisms, Ownership concentration, Controlling shareholder, Board of directors, Supervisory board,
Corporate governance is often regarded as a weak link in Asia's company performance. Most studies have focused on the relationship between ownership and firm value, but the instruments that mediate that relationship have often been overlooked. This paper attempts to address this issue by examining the relationship between ownership types and firm performance by analysing variations in governance practices and their impact on firm performance. This paper shows that different types of majority owners exhibit distinct traits of behaviour and preferences for corporate governance practices in an environment of pervasive concentration of shareholding. Such governance practices and various firm characteristics are found to have an impact on firm performance. Copyright (c) 2007 The Authors; Journal compilation (c) 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
This paper examines China’s recent approach to the development of corporate governance and discusses some major corporate governance issues that need to be resolved. It focuses on the corporate governance issues of China’s larger state owned enterprises that have been corporatised and partially privatised. While the state enterprise sector has been on decline in terms of its contribution to industrial output, its dominance in urban employment, key industries and access to bank finance continues. The publicly listed and partially privatised enterprises portends in many ways the future path in corporate governance arrangements for all other kinds of enterprises in China. The study is based on results of survey data collected by the author on Shanghai’s publicly listed companies. An attempt is also made in this paper to outline a new corporate governance model that may be more appropriate for China’s social and economic conditions. The paper is organised as follows. Section 2 outlines the way the Chinese government has approached the development of corporate governance structures in China in recent years. Section 3 examines some major issues for corporate governance development in China. Section 4 outlines a new corporate governance model that may be better suited to China for the near future. Section 5 provides some conclusions.
China, environmental performance, SO 2 emissions, trade liberalisation 1 | INTRODUCTION Given the increasing concerns over global warming and industrial pollution since the 1990s, discussions on the environmental effects of trade liberalisation have been growing amidst the decades-long rapid growth in international trade following the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO; Copeland & Taylor, 2003, 2004). Our paper uses China's WTO accession as a quasi-natural experiment and our unique firm-level environmental emission database to investigate the relationship between trade openness and air pollution in China. The accession heralded a swift process of significant trade liberalisation that has made China the world's largest producer and exporter of manufactured products. At the same time, air quality in major Chinese cities has also become the world's most polluted. Thus, an intensifying but inconclusive debate regarding the effects of trade on the environment has ensued. On the one hand, as predicted by the pollution haven hypothesis, free trade should worsen China's pollution problems because firms will relocate their pollution-intensive industries to where the environmental standards are laxer, or the enforcement of environmental protection is weak (Bombardini & Li, 2020; Taylor, 2005). On the other hand, freer trade could lead to lower pollution through technological effects via the adoption of pollution abatement technology or technology upgrade (Dean & Lovely, 2010; Poncet, Hering, & Sousa, 2015). We are motivated to investigate the relationship between trade liberalisation and pollution with an alternative approach and perspective using a unique firm-level dataset to produce new evidence on some important areas on which research is rare. While prior studies have mostly employed macroeconomic data
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