Corporate governance and Asian companies

While prominent differences in corporate governance exist across the Asia Pacific region, there are common concerns about controlling shareholders expropriating wealth from minority shareholders at the expense of overall wealth creation, as well as about the roles and qualifications of managers in Asian companies. The contributors to this Special Issue of the Asia Pacific Journal of Management address these concerns and provide new evidence on their empirical relevance, as well as the factors conditioning that relevance. They also provide cautionary insight into the merits of specific proposals to reform Asian corporate governance. An important theme emerging from this Special Issue is that one needs to understand the institutional framework in which organizations operate in order to understand the Asia Pac J Manag (2011) 28:1–14 DOI 10.1007/s10490-010-9240-6 We thank Saturna Capital Corporation and Nick Kaiser (Director and Chairman) for financial support that made possible our Special Issue Conference held in Vancouver in October 2009. We also thank all the authors and reviewers, whose work turned this Special Issue from editors’ vision into reality. We are grateful to Rosalie Tung for delivering a keynote speech at the conference, as well as to Mick Carney, Tom Roehl, and Jongwook Kim for invigorating the discussions of papers presented at the conference. Phil Phan volunteered to take extensive notes of comments and suggestions made at the conference sessions and made them available to authors and editors. We are also grateful to Victor Chen for organizing the conference and to the Segal Graduate School of Business, the CIBC Centre for Corporate Governance and Risk Management, and the Jack Austin Centre for Asia-Pacific Business Studies (all at Simon Fraser University) for hosting the conference. Finally, we thank Rachel Pinkham for editorial assistance. S. Globerman (*) Western Washington University and Simon Fraser University, 516 High Street, MS 9170, Bellingham, WA 98225, USA e-mail: [email protected] M. W. Peng School of Management, University of Texas at Dallas, PO Box 830688, SM 43, Richardson, TX 75083, USA e-mail: [email protected] D. M. Shapiro Segal Graduate School of Business, Simon Fraser University, 500 Granville Street, Vancouver, BC( V6C 1W6, Canada e-mail: [email protected] rationale for and consequences of specific corporate governance models, as well as the likelihood that specific governance reforms will be adopted and prove effective. In this context, informal institutions are often more important than formal institutions. In addition to advancing our understanding and appreciation of the linkages between formal and informal institutions, corporate behavior, and performance, as well as the prospects for corporate governance reform, the papers in this Special Issue also suggest challenging and potentially fruitful areas for future research.