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Why do corporate governance law and practice differ across countries? This paper explains how wage-setting institutions influence ownership structures and investor protection laws. In particular, we identify a nonmonotonic relationship between the level of centralization in wage-bargaining institutions and the level of ownership concentration and investor protection laws. As wage setting becomes more centralized, ownership concentration within firms at first becomes more, and then less, concentrated. In addition, the socially optimal level of investor protection laws is decreasing in ownership concentration. Thus, as wage-setting institutions become more centralized, investor protection laws become less and then more protective. This explanation is consistent with the observable pattern of wage-setting structures, ownership concentration, and investor protection legislation across developed countries. While agreeing with recent research that highlights labor as an important corporate stakeholder in shaping corporate governance, a focus on bargaining structures can resolve an important puzzle this research confronts, namely, why Scandinavian countries with higher than average labor strength also have higher than average investor protection legislation.

The true concept of democracy includes the participation of individuals in the governing process. But due to gargantuan population the active participation of citizen in governing process is not possible. But egovernance makes it possible through online feedback system from the public.

The Botswana Mining Investment and Governance Review (MInGov) collects and shares information on mining sector governance, its attractiveness to investors and how its activities affect national development. It reviews sector performance from the perspective of three main stakeholder groups – government, investors in the mining value chain and civil society – and identifies gaps between declared and actual government policy and practice. The reviews findings are: Performance across the minerals value chain is better in the latter stages related to investment, accumulation, and expenditure of mineral revenue. The mining policy and legal framework are largely sound. The environmental protection legislation is quite current and mostly based on 'good practice' except for access to Environmental Impact Assessments. Land use issues, including resettlement and compensation, require a more inclusive process and stronger legislated framework. A local content policy for the mining industry should be developed with mining sector participation to ensure that both the needs of government and industry are met. Institutions are for the most part staffed with trained, qualified people although sometimes there are not sufficient numbers of staff with the required experience. The top shared priority by all three stakeholder groups is Sector Management and Intragovernmental Coordination. MInGov's methodology focuses on the status of governance and investment conditions in the mining sector from the perspective of stakeholders, and as reportedin primary and secondary sources.

With considerable government, citizen and financial donor attention devoted to a range of international, transnational and domestic laws and policies aimed at protecting, managing and sustainably using fresh and coastal marine water .

The Zambia Mining Investment and Governance Review (MInGov) collects and shares information on mining sector governance, its attractiveness to investors and how its activities affect national development. It reviews sector performance from the perspective of three main stakeholder groups– government, investors in the mining value chain and civil society – and identifies gaps between declared and actual government policy and practice. The review's key findings are: Performance across the value chain is strongest in topics most closely associated with mining and which are related to the content of laws and regulations, though implementation of these is wanting in some instances; Sector development is constrained by a number of bottlenecks; According to investors, a number of areas are constraining mining investment and returns; The three key stakeholder groups agree on a number of topics they believe are particularly important to strengthen sector governance, investment and development impact; Civil society believes there is a number of weaknesses sector governance, including the poor handling of environment and social impacts of mining; problems with human rights associated with the sector; ineffective development planning as it relates to mining; issues concerning land access, compensation and resettlement; and the absence of revenue sharing between national and local government.MInGov's methodology focuses on the status of governance and investment conditions in the mining sector from the perspective of stakeholders, and as reported in primary and secondary sources. However, less-well covered areas include the quality of its infrastructure services, the security of property from theft, the underlying strength of institutions, and ways to enhance mining's contribution to local and national development.This report presents data on mining investment and governance indicators for Zambia that are current as of October 2015.

Kenya's March 2013 elections ushered in a popular system of devolved government that represented the country's biggest political transformation since independence. Yet within months there were public calls for a referendum to significantly revise the new arrangements. This article analyses the campaign that was led by the newly elected governors in order to understand the ongoing disputes over the introduction of decentralisation in Kenya, and what they tell us about the potential for devolution to check the power of central government and to diffuse political and ethnic tensions. Drawing on Putnam's theory of two-level games, we suggest that Kenya's new governors have proved willing and capable of acting in concert to protect their own positions because the pressure that governors are placed under at the local level to defend county interests has made it politically dangerous for them to be co-opted by the centre. As a result, the Kenyan experience cannot be read as a case of 'recentralisation' by the national government, or as one of the capture of sub-national units by 'local elites' or 'notables'. Rather, decentralisation in Kenya has generated a political system with a more robust set of checks and balances, but at the expense of fostering a new set of local controversies that have the potential to exacerbate corruption and fuel local ethnic tensions in some parts of the country.

This paper shows that governance quality promotes positive net inflows of high-skilled migrants. Home and foreign institutions influence both inflows and outflows, thus determining the net flows of college graduate migrants. Therefore, institutions can affect human capital through migration flows. Our empirical strategy is based on a random utility model from which we derive the net balance of migrants and an exclusion restriction to control for the selection of migrants. We test the predictions of the model using comprehensive matrices of migration by education level and a synthetic indicator of governance quality. We account for endogeneity concerns by means of an instrumental strategy and we disentangle the effect of the quality of domestic and foreign institutions on both inflows and outflows.

Governments do not have perfect information regarding constituent priorities and needs. This lack of knowledge opens the door for groups to lobby in order to affect the government's taxation levels. We examine the political economy of decentralized revenue-raising authority in light of social protection expenditures by constructing a theoretical model of hierarchical contests and comparing the implications of centralized with decentralized governance. Increasing information available to the government may generate additional expenditures by interest groups trying to affect government taxation decisions. We show the potential existence of a poverty trap as a result of decentralization in taxation decisions.

"Der Cyberraum mit rund 3,2 Milliarden Internetnutzerinnen und -nutzern ist in den letzten Jahren zunehmend zu einem Feld politischer Kontroversen geworden. Dabei stehen sich zwei Konzepte gegenüber: Auf der einen Seite wollen einige Regierungen Fragen das Internet betreffend in einem multilateralen völkerrechtlichen Vertrag regeln. Auf der anderen Seite steht das Konzept des Multistakeholderismus. Diesem entsprechend hat sich, der Vielschichtigkeit des ›Ökosystems Internet Governance‹ folgend, ein dezentraler Mechanismus entwickelt, an dem staatliche und nichtstaatliche Akteure auf verschiedenen Ebenen für unterschiedliche Themen zuständig sind. Das im Jahr 2005 gegründete Internet Governance Forum (IGF) ist die wichtigste globale Plattform für diese Diskussion. Das Mandat des IGFs wurde im Dezember 2015 von der UN-Generalversammlung bis zum Jahr 2025 verlängert." (Autorenreferat)

This essay is a contribution to the forthcoming Oxford University Press Handbook of Corporate Law and Governance edited by Jeffery Gordon and Georg Ringe. In the 1960s and 1970s, corporate law and finance scholars recognized that neither discipline was doing a very good job of explaining how corporations were really structured and performed. For legal scholars, Yale Law School professor and then Stanford Law School dean Bayless Manning confessed that corporate law has "nothing left but our great empty corporation statutes – towering skyscrapers of rusted girders, internally welded together and containing nothing but wind." Michael Jensen and William Meckling made a similar comment with respect to finance. The theory of the firm was an "empty box" or a "black box" that provided no theory about "how the conflicting objectives of the individual participants are brought into equilibrium." The result of Jensen and Meckling's seminal reframing of corporate law in agency cost terms, and so into something far broader than disputes over statutory language, was that both Manning's empty skyscrapers and Jensen and Meckling's empty box began to be filled. The essay proceeds by tracking how corporate law became corporate governance – from legal rules standing alone to legal rules interacting with non-legal processes and institutions – through three somewhat idiosyncratically chosen but nonetheless related examples of how we have come to usefully complicate the inquiry into the structures that bear on corporate decision-making and performance. Part I frames the first level of complication in moving from law to governance by defining governance broadly as the company's operating system, a braided framework encompassing legal and non-legal elements. Part II then adds a second level of complication by treating corporate governance dynamically: corporate governance becomes a path dependent outcome of the tools available when a national governance system begins taking shape, and the process by which elements are added to the governance system going forward – driven by what Paul Milgrom and John Roberts call "supermodularity." That characteristic reads importantly on both the difficulty of corporate governance, as opposed to corporate law, reform and the non-intuitive pattern of the results of reform: significant reform leads to things getting worse before they get better. Part II then further complicates corporate governance by expanding it beyond the boundaries of the corporation, treating particular governance regimes as complementary to other social structures – for example, the labor market, the capital market and the political structure – that together define different varieties of capitalism. Next, Part III considers commonplace, but I will suggest misguided, efforts to take a different tack from Parts I and II: to simplify rather than complicate corporate governance analysis by recourse to now familiar single factor analytic models: stakeholder theory, team production, director primacy, and shareholder primacy. Part III suggests that these reductions are neither models nor particularly helpful; they neither bridge the contextual specificity of most corporate governance analysis nor address the necessary interaction in allocating responsibilities among shareholders, teams and directors. As well, these "models" are static rather than dynamic, a serious failing in an era in which the second derivative of change is positive in many business environments and Schumpeter seems to be getting the better of Burke. Part IV concludes by examining the importance of a corporate governance system's capacity to respond to changes in the business environment: the greater the rate of change, the more important is a governance system's capacity to adapt and the less important its ability to support long-term firm-specific investment.

The modern system of global governance is comprised of a hegemonic cycle, a network of state-IGO affiliations, and the interstate system that derives its continuity from the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. To empirically capture multiple dimensions of each of these three elements of global governance, this research examines the emergence and development of three separate networks, these being networks of international trade, foreign aid, and IGO membership since the establishment of the League of Nations. Network analysis was performed on matrices for the period where data are available, rendering the densities, centralities, and hierarchical structures of these networks and their respective hegemons. These values were subsequently incorporated into an attribute dataset of established, non-network measures of global governance—among them, a hegemon's military budget, and the ratio of world imports to world GDP—in an effort to assess measures of autocorrelation, cross-correlation, and conduct other time-series analysis, including Prais-Winsten regressions. Several relationships were identified using bivariate and partial cross-correlation coefficients, though there is little uniformity in them from which to draw a singular narrative.