The State of Asian Corporate Governance: A Presentation by Jamie Allen: CARE Conference | Hong Kong Polytechnic University | June 9, 2014

Since the 1998 Asian financial crisis, there has been considerable corporate governance reform in the region. But such reform has proceeded on two tracks. On one track, international rules are dominant, and common accounting and financial reporting standards are essentially accepted as necessary for trade and investment. On the second track, however, local cultural norms continue to exert a strong influence on the functioning of the boards, the quality of dialogue with shareholders, and the way they manage related party transactions and capital raising. As a consequence, in these matters of internal governance—where legacy issues and culture, and not international standards, continue to be the main driving force behind governance—there continue to be significant differences among Asian countries. And thus even as convergence is occurring in certain aspects of governance, it is expected to remain limited, particularly in the functioning of boards and internal governance. As for the case of China, there was such a flurry of rule‐making in the early 2000s—a national Code of Corporate Governance in 2002, and a Directive on Quarterly Reports in 2003—that people in Hong Kong used to enjoy saying that China's corporate governance standards were higher than Hong Kong's. But if that may have been true on paper, the reality has been quite different.