ABSTRACT
The idea that one system of corporate governance might serve as a model for the whole world is an idea that has not had a happy time of late. The past several years have witnessed remarkable shifts in enthusiasm for and against alternative systems of corporate governance. Early on, the vogue was to chastise the economic and social contradictions of the American system while extolling the advantages of the German or Japanese model. Attitudes changed with the subsequent collapse of the Japanese economy and the spectacle of a floundering Germany, which contrasted with the U.S. boom in its technology-based ‘new’ economy. Throughout the 1990s, specific upheavals such as the Asian financial crises, Russia’s Volga virus, Mexico’s peso problem, and, in the U.S., the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), along with a seemingly endless series of corporate scandals, created for some a sense that all systems were out of control.
