Governance Arrangements for Effective Public Financial Policies: a Central Banker’s Perspective

There is, these days, a great deal of discussion about corporate governance. This is largely because governance arrangements thought (with hindsight) to be defi cient shared the blame for some spectacular corporate failures in the latter stages of the US tech boom of the late 1990s. Of course such problems are not that new. Indeed, one could safely assert that governance problems, broadly defi ned, can be found in the margins of most of the fi nancial debacles of history; on plenty of occasions, they played a starring role. In Australia’s own case, the collapses of the empires of some of the celebrated ‘entrepreneurs’ of the 1980s revealed serious failures of a governance nature (though not only of that nature).