5. Corporate governance
5.1. Enforceability of contracts
We evaluate four measures of the ease of enforcing contracts between management and the providers of firms’ finance. The first three measures are general assessments of the legal environment: the efficiency of the judiciary, corruption (which includes bribing the judiciary and other branches of the government), and the rule of law. The fourth measure is a general assessment of corporate governance.
Judicial efficiency measured on a scale of zero to ten is shown in Table 3, with 20 observations (not including any post-Communist countries) from Business International Corporation, as cited by LLSV (1998). Indonesia easily has the worst score (2.5), while Hong Kong, Israel, and Singapore have the best (10). As Fig. 1 shows, there is a wide dispersion of values both within Asia and across emerging markets in general. This variable is highly significant in the exchange rate regression with and without the East Asia dummy (Columns 1 and 2 of Table 5) and remains significant even if we drop Indonesia. Judicial efficiency becomes significant at the 5% level if we control for foreign exchange reserves (shown in Table 5) or import coverage (not shown in Table 5) and significant at the 6% level if we include both macroeconomic variables. Neither of these macroeconomic control variables is significant either separately or jointly in a regression with judicial efficiency.