IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-0-230-25051-2_4.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Governance Down-under: An Overview of Corporate Governance in Australia

In: Global Boards

Author

Listed:
  • John Cottrell

    (Swinburne University of Technology)

Abstract

Australia’s small but highly developed corporate and financial systems compare well internationally. Building from a low post-World War 2 base the Australian economy thrived, initially “on the sheep’s back” and latterly from an ever expanding “mine and ship” commodities boom. The non-farm/ mining sectors moved steadily from manufacturing to services. The highly developed financial services sector grew rapidly from the 1990s to offer leading superannuation and unit trust structures and reforms. Corporate governance systems that evolved from a United Kingdom “principles”-based parentage have endured and continued to flourish. Arguably influenced by a stream of US management theory and market-linked “rules”-based governance guidance, Australia has maintained its principles-based governance system and become a leading international participant in good corporate governance notwithstanding many high-profile homegrown corporate scandals and collapses. In a country of avid adopters, corporate Australia has set a leading pace in the separation of the roles of chairman and CEO across its major publicly listed corporations coupled with strong measures for determining non-executive director independence. The “down-under” effect of corporate isolation in the southern hemisphere and the entrepreneurial thirst for scarce capital required to develop a large sparsely populated island continent has undoubtedly driven Australia’s corporate leaders to steer a fine path between the governance paradox that seemingly conflicts the northern hemisphere.

Suggested Citation

  • John Cottrell, 2009. "Governance Down-under: An Overview of Corporate Governance in Australia," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Andrew Kakabadse & Nada Kakabadse (ed.), Global Boards, chapter 3, pages 55-84, Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-25051-2_4
    DOI: 10.1057/9780230250512_4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-25051-2_4. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.