Explaining the production and dissemination of global corporate governance standards: A law and economics approach to corporate governance codes as a global law-making technology
Résumé
The chapter questions the production and dissemination of global standards of corporate governance across OECD countries in the recent decades. It argues that convergence around similar corporate governance principles – defined in broad terms and at a high level of generality – was made possible due to deep changes in law-making technologies occurring over the same period. In the recent decades, traditional legal technologies became inefficient in meeting the new legal needs of economic agents generated by economic globalization and the increase of cross-border investment. In the field of corporate governance, this resulted in increased reliance on soft law, and especially corporate governance codes. We argue that the specific features of codes as a legal technology (characterized by a self-regulatory production process, legal standards rather than detailed rules, strong reliance on the comply-or-explain principle, and the use of non-legal sanctions) may have facilitated the emergence and dissemination of global corporate governance standards across OECD countries.