The Governance Environment
To carefully delineate the unique approaches to corporate governance that has evolved in China and India, it is important to understand the environments that firms in these countries are embedded in, and how these environments are changing. The scope of discussion and research here include examining the reforms, cultural norms, rule of law, regulations, and role of history. For example, how do accounting rules in these countries differ from those in mature economies? Research on environments could also build links to other issues and their impact on governance practices and firm performance.
Executives and Directors
Are CEOs and top management behaviors, leadership styles, compensation norms, selection practices, interpersonal networks, unique or different in China and India? How do these elements influence firm performance? What are the specific roles of boards of directors? How are board members selected and evaluated? What determines board effectiveness? How effective are the boards?
Stakeholder Management
How do various stakeholders negotiate their rights? How are powers and influence shifting among various stakeholders? How do institutional investors, NGOs and analysts influence governance practices? How reliable and transparent are organizational communication with stakeholders?
Ownership and Control
What is the structure of firm ownership? What is the impact of state majority and minority ownership on governance? What are the role of business groups and family ownership in governance? How do family dynamics influence governance?
All these questions bear careful scrutiny for corporate governance in general, and corporate governance in China and India in particular.
THE SPECIAL ISSUE
The ultimate mission of Corporate Governance: An International Review (CGIR) is to develop a rigorous and relevant global theory of corporate governance. Since the preponderance of theory and research that we have so far has emanated from scholars operating in and studying developed economies, this special issue gives the inter-disciplinary field of corporate governance a chance to redress some imbalances and fill some voids. Indeed, while one special issue cannot address all the issues discussed above, in this volume, we have attempted to assemble a set of papers that were undoubtedly representative of the submissions we received, but also were theoretically grounded, empirically sound and raised provocative new questions. These papers highlight the unique governance issues facing China and India, and use multiple theoretical lenses to interpret and understand them.
The first two articles in this special issue are comparative studies of both China and India. In our lead-off article, “Business group affiliation, firm governance and firm performance: Evidence from China and India,”Singh and Gaur (2009) use institutional and agency theories to examine corporate governance practices in both China and India. Specifically, they examine how business group affiliation, ownership concentration, and board independence affect firm performance. Using archival data on top 500 Chinese and Indian firms from multiple data sources for 2007, they found that group affiliated firms performed worse than unaffiliated firms, and the negative relationship was stronger in the case of Indian firms than Chinese firms. They also found that ownership concentration had a positive effect on firm performance, while board independence had a negative effect on firm performance. Intriguingly, they found that the link between group affiliation and firm performance within a country was moderated by ownership concentration.
In our second article, “CSR communications intensity in Chinese and Indian multinational companies,”Lattemann, Fetscherin, Alon, Li, and Schneider (2009) address the puzzle of why firms in China, which has a higher level of economic development and thus should communicate more corporate social responsibility (CSR) according to existing theories, communicate less than firms in India? They use a model that includes country-, industry-, and firm-level factors to predict CSR communications intensity, a proxy for CSR activities. Using data on the largest multinational companies in China and India, they show that Indian firms communicate more CSR primarily due to a more rule-based (as opposed to relation-based) governance environment. Also, firms in the manufacturing sector tended to communicate more CSR than firms in service sectors. Finally, firm-level characteristics such as size, CEO duality of CEO, and outsider representation also were found to have a significant influence on CSR communications.
The remaining five articles were single-country studies that focused on corporate governance in China or India. For example, Shen and Lin (2009) studied the relationships between firm profitability, state ownership, and top management turnover at partially privatized firms through the lens of behavioral theory of organizational search in their paper, “Firm profitability, state ownership, and top management turnover at the listed firms in China: A behavioral perspective.” They find that firm profitability and state ownership are negatively related to top management turnover only when firm profitability is below target (measured by industry median). They also find that top management turnover has a positive impact on subsequent firm profitability when it occurs under performance below target, but has a negative impact when it occurs under performance above target. In addition, they report that top management turnover under performance below target has a positive impact on subsequent firm profitability when the state is not the largest shareholder, but has no impact when the state is the largest shareholder.
In their article entitled “Non-tradable Share Reform and Corporate Governance in the Chinese Stock Market,”Yeh, Shu, Lee, and Su (2009) studied agency problems in Chinese listed firms by examining the tradable and non-tradable shares, a unique phenomenon during China's financial market development that provides a natural experimental setting to observe how agency problems are embedded in different classes of ownership. They found that compensation is positively correlated with non-tradable shares, the pledge ratio, and related-party transactions; foreign ownership is negatively associated with compensation. For firms with relatively weak governance or severe agency problems, tradable shareholders demand higher compensation to compensate their concerns. However, the effect of these variables reverses on the ex-post wealth effect of tradable shareholders.
Liu and Lin (2009) examine the association between the internal corporate governance mechanism of firms and their auditor switching behavior among the listed firms in China in their paper titled, “The determinants of auditor switch from the perspective of corporate governance in China.” They distinguished between two types of auditor switching–switching to a larger auditor or switching to a smaller auditor. They find that to protect and realize opaqueness gains, firms with weaker corporate governance (higher ownership concentration and shared CEOs and Board of Directors' chairmen) generally are more likely to switch to a smaller auditor rather than to a larger one.
In “Board structure and firm performance: Evidence from India's top companies,”Jackling and Johl (2009) studied how composition of the board, board size, and aspects of board leadership, including duality and board “busyness,” impact firm performance within Indian firms. They frame their paper using agency and resource dependence theories. They found that outside directors and larger boards have a role in improving performance, while outside directors with multiple appointments have a negative impact on performance. They also found that CEO power due to duality (or being a promoter) and board meeting frequency was not associated with performance.
Finally, Zattoni, Pedersen, and Kumar's (2009) paper, “The performance of business group firms during institutional transition: A longitudinal study of Indian firms,” examined how reforms led to the dilution of the role of business groups within India. They use institutional and transaction cost theories to examine if group affiliated firms outperformed unaffiliated firms. Analyzing data from 1990 to 2006 they found that group affiliated firms enjoyed superior performance in the early stages of the reforms, but the performance leveled out in the latter phase. They also found that older group affiliated firms were better able to cope with institutional transition than younger group affiliated firms, and found that group affiliated service firms were better able to cope with institutional transition than group affiliated manufacturing firms.
SOME PRELIMINARY CONCLUSIONS
Some of the findings presented in the papers in this issue were consistent with the findings in developed economies; other results were contradictory. Do Western theories and findings hold up when applied in the context of China and India? Do we need uniquely Asian theories to address the governance issues in China and India? While the papers in this special issue allow us to begin to answer these questions, we believe many more questions remain to be asked and answered. It is clear that some theories – such as the agency and institutional perspectives – offer useful lenses with which to view corporate governance practices and issues across different cultures. However, we also note that given the unique historical and religious backgrounds, paths of development, and sheer size of China and India, the patterns of corporate governance and the interrelationships among the key concepts and relationships may be considerably different from what have been established in existing theories. If correct, this suggests that contextually rich, new theory building is required.