Corporate Governance in Emerging Markets

The turning of the twenty-first century has been marked by reforms in corporate governance practices around the world. Prevalent ways of doing business are changing with increasing demands for corporate transparency and accountability, shifts in ownership control, empowerment of new types of owner, and so on. Countries and firms have adapted their corporate governance policies and practices accordingly. This chapter explores the current patterns of the ownership structure of publicly listed firms in six emerging countries: Brazil, Chile, South Korea, Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland in the beginning of the twenty-first century, and compare our data with existing research from the 1990s. The chapter concludes that, although concentration of corporate shareholdings continues to be a common denominator among these emerging countries, the processes and structures controlling firms are remarkably different.