Corporate Governance Structures in Postsocialist Economies: Toward a Central Eastern European Model of Corporate Governance?

Fifteen years after the dawn of postsocialist economic transformation, corporate governance structures are extremely different across Central Eastern European countries (CEECs) and CIS members. The different corporate governance structures in CEECs can be sketched as four stylised facts: foreign capital controlling stake, managerial control (sometimes with the co-operation of banks), an outsider-insider coalition governing the enterprise, and a peculiar ‘employee and start-up' governance. In the past recent years, some converging tendencies toward an ‘average' Central Eastern European model of corporate governance have shown up; its two major pillars are a strong foreign investor control over big corporations combined with a strong governance by its single owner over genuine small and medium sized private enterprises (SMEs).Although our classification of corporate governance structures may fit with the principalagent model, it is not the agency cost theory, which lies in the background of our presentation. Thus, after a brief critical assessment of this model, we would suggest how, in our view, the economic analysis of corporate control over firms in CEECs can progress beyond the main conclusions of a principal-agent approach.