Governance: Coordination Service Firms and Corporate Governance

Compared to the various forms of intergovernmental or public-private co-operation, transna-tional private self-regulation is a rather rarely studied case of global economic governance. Furthermore, existing research on transnational self-regulation has neglected the issue of corporate governance, which is central to the way capitalism is organised today. Transnational private self-regulation, however, appears to be a crucial part of any explanation of current changes of national models of corporate governance and, therefore, of the basic organisation of economic life. Three features of private self-regulation are singled out for a more detailed study, namely credit rating, private codes of “good corporate governance ” and the transna-tional harmonisation of accounting standards. In all of these cases, co-ordination service firms such as rating agencies, institutional investors and accounting companies play an important role as mechanisms for the transnational harmonisation of corporate governance. The paper concludes that the increasing role of transnational private self-regulation raises important nor-mative concerns and, in more particular, asks for the identification of alternative agency