Business Governance in Brazil and South Africa: How Much Convergence to The Anglo-Saxon Model?

ABSTRACT The effect of globalization on national economic and political strategies is a central theme in policy analysis. At the core of this debate is business governance, interpreted in this paper in a wide sense as the laws, rules, and routines that govern large-scale corporations. Conventional wisdom has it that cross-national patterns of business governance are converging on the so-called Anglo-Saxon, capital-market driven model. In this paper I analyze recent changes in Brazil and South Africa, to conclude that models of business governance should be seen jointly with the institutional underpinnings of the economy. These include legal traditions that are unlikely to undergo rapid changes, other institutional features directly related to the ways in which first compete in the global economy, and the mechanisms through which social actors resist changes adverse to their interests.

摘要 全球化对国家经济与政治战略的影响，是政策分析领域的核心议题。本次研讨的核心指向商业治理，本文将其广义界定为规制大型企业的法律、规则与惯例。传统共识认为，各国商业治理模式正趋同于所谓以资本市场为驱动的盎格鲁-撒克逊模式。本文通过剖析巴西与南非的近期变革，得出如下结论：商业治理模式应与经济体的制度基础结合起来审视。这些制度基础涵盖难以快速变革的法律传统、与全球经济竞争路径直接相关的其他制度特征，以及社会行动者抵制有损自身利益的变革的机制。