Capital Markets the Corporation and the Asian Century: Governance, Accountability and the Future of Corporate Law

The form and content of capital market regulation and corporate law are being challenged as never before. Endogenous and exogenous factors combine to question both the corporate form and conceptual underpinnings of market governance. As a result both face authority and legitimacy threats further exacerbated by the geopolitical and economic power shifts associated with the rise of the Asian Century.

In 1993, Jim O’Neil of Goldman Sachs coined the ‘BRIC’ acronym to highlight the growing importance of the mid-tier economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China. Subsequently refined projections–based on GDP growth, per capita income and currency flows–implied that further integration provided the building blocks of a global economic re-alignment. In 2011, HSBC–a bank that likes to advertise its acumen in knowing when emerging markets have emerged–chose an even more arresting metaphor. We are, it is claimed, witnessing the re-emergence of the Southern Silk Road. This view also positions China as the pivotal hub in a global trading operation. As with the BRIC projections a decade earlier, the transformative implications are forecast to be far-reaching. The timescale, however, has shortened from the realm of futurology. The global bank predicts a ten-fold increase in trade and capital flows between emerging markets over the next forty years. The creation of a ‘new global south,’ it argues, ‘is set to revolutionize the global economy.’ As could be expected, HSBC has been careful to stress the benefits.

Left unstated are the ideational and structural strains on domestic corporate law and securities regulation. Whether the Asian Century marks the return to the historical norm after a short-lived Western interregnum, the triumph of a new mercantilism or an opportunity to reshape the function and purpose of the corporation and the market in which it is nested remains exceptionally contested. In 1960 Edward Mason noted “the fact seems to be that the rise of the large corporation and attending circumstances have confronted us with a long series of questions concerning rights and duties, privileges and immunities, responsibility and authority, that political and legal philosophy have not yet assimilated.” The insight retains its sagacity. The rise of state capitalism adds a further layer of complexity. Disentangling the interests of the competing forces forging the Asian century is one of the defining legal, policy and political economy imperatives of our time. 

This international conference, staged in association with the prestigous Adolf Berle Center on Corporations, Law and Society at the University of Seattle  brought together leading practitioners, policymakers and academics to map and chart the role and function of capital markets, the corporation and domestic corporate law frameworks in the Asian Century.    

Full conference program

 

Originally Published: 
13/05/2013