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On 29th - 30th March 2007, SUERF and the Central Bank of Cyprus jointly organized a Seminar: Corporate Governance in Financial Institutions. The papers in the present publication are based on a sample of the presentations at the Seminar. Together, the papers illuminate a number of key issues in corporate governance in a variety of financial firms. In the first paper based on a keynote address, Spyros G. Stavrinakis, Central Bank of Cyprus gives an overview of the legal framework for corporate governance in financial institutions in Cyprus. According to a Central BankDirective issued in 2006, implementation of corporate governance principles is mandatory for all banks incorporated in Cyprus and their overseas branches and for some Cyprus branches of foreign banks domiciled outside the European Economic Area. Banks are obliged to have a robust internal governance framework, consistent lines of reporting and effective risk identification, management, monitoring and reporting procedures for all the risks to which credit institutions are actually or potentially exposed. The board of directors should take the lead in establishing and approving ethical standards and corporate values for itself and for the bank's senior executive management. Potential conflicts of interest should be identified, prevented or appropriately managed. Each bank should maintain a compliance function that monitors compliance with rules, regulations and policies. Clear lines of responsibility and accountability should be set and enforced. New members of the board of directors as well as the senior executive managers of banks have to be vetted and approved by the Central Bank of Cyprus for their " fitness and properness." In order to ensure transparency concerning the implementation of the principles, each bank's corporate governance framework should be disclosed in the bank's annual report and on its public website. In the second paper by Christian Harm, University of Muenster, "The Governance of the Banking Firm" the author builds on the literatures on corporate governance and financial regulation. In relation to governance of financial institutions, agency theory has both merits and shortcomings. It provides good explanations in many delegation situations but it has severe difficulties in dealing with institutions with several stakeholders and complex objective functions for the management. Firms guided by shareholder value may work more effectively than firms guided by stakeholder cacophony. Depositors are important stakeholders in banks. Since they are typically incapable of managing the supervision of their claims on the bank, they rely on regulators to do it for them. Remuneration systems for bank managers should provide proper incentives. According to the author, incentives should be structured such as to reward particular strategic achievements. Banks can apply executive stock option plans, but should confine options to a secondary place behind other long-term incentives based on success criteria that further shareholder interests without compromising the regulatory mission. Such an incentive framework tends, however, to be very complex so that the general ambiguities associated with the concept of governance could imply that in the banking firm, selecting managers with a proper intrinsic motivation may be superior to defining complex remuneration programs. In the third paper "Corporate Governance Issues in Non-Shareholder Value Financial Institutions: ACase Study of Mutual Building Societies in the UK", David T. Llewellyn, Loughborough University, focuses on corporate governance in non-incorporated financial firms. The author describes the relevant stakeholders and the nature of agency problems in different types of financial firms. He compares monitoring mechanisms, incentives, abilities and feasibilities of managers and members of mutuals. Mutuality raises specific corporate governance issues: Corporate governance is less clearly defined because the firm's objectives are less clearly defined. Conflicts of interest between managers and owners are less easily identified and it is more difficult to create management incentives. The almost exclusive source of capital is retained profits and each member has a non-exclusive and non-marketable claim to residual net worth. Voting rights are typically not proportional to the size of the ownership stake. There is no market in ownership claims and therefore no effective market in corporate control. Consequently, there is ample scope for mutuals to be inefficient. There is, however, no evidence that the efficiency and performance of mutuals are poorer that that of incorporated financial firms. In the fourth paper "Corporate Governance in Emerging Market Banks", Bridget Gandy, Fitch Ratings Ltd., and her co-authors from the rating agency look at the framework for corporate governance of banks in a sample of emerging market countries. Since the crisis in the late 1990s in Latin America and Asia, there has been a marked improvement in corporate governance of financial institutions in the regions under observation. Many countries have taken legal steps to develop functioning market economies with a view to the need to satisfy the demands of international capital markets. Several banks have listed their shares on stock exchanges in developed markets and foreign bank ownership and involvement in local banking systems have increased. In Central and Eastern Europe, countries' desire for EU-accession has impacted on the development of their corporate governance systems. At the individual bank level, Fitch Ratings looks at bank board independence and quality, oversight and the importance of related party transactions, the integrity of the audit process, acceptability of executive and director remuneration, ownership structures and transparency. In evaluating the quality of governance at the country level, the authors apply a three-pillar approach in line with Montesquieu: Powers and responsibilities need to be separated between a representative legislature, a competent and accountable executive branch and a fair and independent judiciary. The paper contains an interesting table in which a number of key regulatory initiatives in a sample of emerging market countries are compared. The authors point out that large scale privatizations have reduced the importance of state-owned banks in many countries. There are, however, still several examples with complex holding structures involving banks with potential negative implications for corporate governance quality and problems with related party transactions. Acquisitions by foreign banks with developed corporate governance standards have generally had a positive impact and also listing of bank shares on foreign stock exchanges with tough disclosure and transparency requirements have contributed positively to the quality of corporate governance in emerging market banks. Read together, the four papers give a good overview of the development of corporate governance practices and remaining problems in financial institutions of different types and with domicile in different countries.

International audience ; As with European experiments, in various regions in France, territorial intelligence projects have been initiated since 2003. (see the regions of Lower Normandy, Lorraine, Réunion Island, the Aquitaine region, etc.).The objective of these is to gather and exploit information which is not confined to particular sectors and the collective processing of which can contribute to durable development. Apart from institutions, civil society and the inhabitants of the territory, it is observed that companies and in particular small and medium sized enterprises are natural partners who show interest in such initiatives. Both the different economic chains and the participating organizations thus derive considerable benefit in terms of the anticipation of threats and in the reaffirmation of the territory as a common resource worth defending. Above and beyond the information processing systems operating within these organizations or economic chains, the articulation of internal actions to generate informational capital in terms of local territorial intelligence, produces a leverage effect with visibility of European or even worldwide visibility (Herbaux, 2007)52. Nonetheless these experiments lead to widely differing results, of which the progressive abandonment of the project by the companies involved is one of the most commonly observed. To support a theoretical contribution as a thread for this communication, we report on the results of a Delphi type survey completed in 2006 and covering 53 companies in the Nord- Pas de Calais region involved in a process of territorial intelligence since 2003. This revealed that 43 companies out of the 53 concerned had not followed through on their internal information sharing project and contented themselves, by default, with the results by economic sector derived from public regional surveillance Beyond this apparent disengagement from the process initiated, we may be curious about this apparent discretion of a group of actors concerning local government. This ...

Der Beitrag stellt am Beispiel Malaysias einen neueren Ansatz zur Transformationsmessung vor, der aus der Entwicklungspolitik stammt und an der United Nations University in Tokyo entwickelt wurde, namentlich der World Governance Survey. Gezeigt wird, dass die Indizes des Instruments sich einer soliden Messmethodik bedienen, es jedoch kaum gelingt, diejenigen Institutionen und Spielregeln der Politik zu erfassen, welche ihren Niederschlag in einem Raum finden, der begrifflich und theoretisch nur schwer zugänglich ist und daher meist aus den Blick gerät. So geraten für Malaysia die islamischen Organisationen auf der Ebene der Zivilgesellschaft häufig aus dem Blickfeld, weil es dort genügend andere Gruppierungen gibt, die in einer "uns" vertrauten Sprache und Terminologie kommunizieren. Auf ihren Aussagen bauen "unsere" Urteile maßgeblich auf. Dem Ansatz des World Governance Survey wird in dieser Hinsicht jedoch bescheinigt, einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Reflektion dieses methodischen Problems geleistet zu haben, denn die Berücksichtigung der Binnenperspektive erlaubt tiefere Einsichten weitaus eher als ein fremder Blick von außen. (ICA2)

The concept of the globalisation has experienced an astonishing career in the 1990s. By the resolution of the Soviet block and the breakdown of the Berlin Wall the planet seemed to become all together from uniform principles of western-modern life creation interlace. If one wants to bring the spirit of the times of the last turn of the century on the concept, one can say that we have entered into the epoch of the globalisation. There remains to us no other alternative. The concept of the globalisation controls furthermore the headlines, without always becomes clear what is meant with it. Therefore, this present thesis offers an introduction to the topic. Globalisation is a many-faceted process which stamps the societies today radically. A network of growing density has broken open the Partikularismus in all life forms and speeds up in rapid tempo worldwide exchange, adaptation processes and mutual influencing in the area of economy, policy and society. The globalisation has hardened to a Kohärenz which presents itself not only to the focused field of vision of social-scientific analysis, but to the everyday object of experience of the individuals in all parts of the world asserts itself. If these are the technically ingenious possibilities of the globalized transfer of information and flow of communication, the worldwide exchange of persons, goods, services and money, the cultural-covering adjustment and Transfers of consumption customs or the global standardization of perception patterns and values – in all life connections becomes the globalisation immediately perceptible. However, with precise investigation of the globalisation process another picture will appear. Of a globalisation can be spoken only in several times limited sense. While more than 70 percent of the good exports move between the triad (the EU, Japan and the USA), less than 20 percent of the commercial volume are cancelled to nearly three quarters of the world population. The number of the trans-nationwide operating enterprises has risen ...

This article examines whether multi-level governance (MLG) as a practice has been established in Sweden. It does so by dividing multi-level governance into vertical and horizontal dimensions. The article argues that there is a multi-level policy process within Swedish regional policy and that a degree of network governance has been introduced in Sweden through the Regional Growth Programmes and regional partnerships. Regional partnerships also demonstrate how the horizontal and vertical aspects of MLG have become intertwined. However, the article concludes that vertical MLG has not yet been fully introduced in Sweden because there is no new regional level. However, with the recommendations of the Committee on Public Sector Responsibilities, a new regional level in Sweden may not be too distant. Adapted from the source document.

"Die Konjunktur des Begriffs Governance in der Europaforschung steht in Zusammenhang mit dem Übergang von der Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft zur Politischen Union. Den Ansprüchen, die mit diesem Integrationsschritt verbunden waren, standen Restriktionen des Regierens entgegen, die aus Kompetenzordnung und der Gewaltenteilung der EU resultieren. Mit Governance oder 'new modes of governance' bezeichnete man die Auswege aus dieser Schwierigkeit. Es wäre allerdings verfehlt, Governance deswegen auf 'weiche' Steuerung zu reduzieren. Solche Charakterisierungen entspringen einer Verwendung von Governance, die die Komplexität der realen Struktur-Prozess-Zusammenhänge nicht beachtet. In dem Beitrag wird dafür plädiert, in der Governance-Forschung die notwendige Komplexität der Analyse zu erhalten. Zwar ist es erforderlich, in politischen Prozessen die grundlegenden institutionellen Regeln, Formen der Interaktion und Mechanismen der Koordination zu identifizieren. In der Realität beobachten wir aber regelmäßig Kombinationen von Formen und Mechanismen des kollektiven Handelns und in Mehrebenensystemen stehen Akteure immer in mehreren institutionellen Kontexten. Die jeweiligen Kombinationen resultieren aus den Bemühungen der Akteure, mit den Restriktionen umzugehen, die ihnen die Institutionen setzen. Sie bieten Variationsspielräume, die je nach Entscheidungssituation genutzt werden können; aber wenn mehrere Koordinationsmechanismen die Interaktionen lenken, können auch erhebliche Störungen des Policy-Making entstehen. Mit dieser Perspektive können wir ein besseres Verständnis der Funktionsweise, der Schwierigkeiten und der Dynamik von Politik im europäischen Mehrebenensystem gewinnen." (Autorenreferat)

"Im Mittelpunkt unseres Beitrags steht die Governance regulativer Politik im europäischen Mehrebenensystem. Die empirische Analyse konzentriert sich auf drei der wichtigsten Infrastrukturbereiche: die Telekommunikation, den Elektrizitätssektor und das Eisenbahnwesen in drei westeuropäischen Ländern (Deutschland, Frankreich und Großbritannien). Die zentrale These unseres Beitrags lautet, dass für die Regulierung öffentlicher Infrastrukturen in Europa die Herausbildung eines mehrdimensionalen, dynamischen Interaktionsraumes charakteristisch ist, in dem verschiedene GovernanceModi auf eigentümliche Weise kombiniert werden. Dieser politische Interaktionsraum wird nicht durch formale Institutionen und Kompetenzen definiert, sondern durch Akteursstrategien, Interaktionen und Dynamiken des europäischen Mehrebenensystems konstituiert." (Autorenreferat)