International corporate governance Coursework Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3500 words

International corporate governance - Coursework Example he corporate sector of Australia has previously been regarded to hold the same core features as those of the United States and the United Kingdom.7 These issues will be discussed thoroughly in the later sections. The goal of corporate governance, which offers guidelines to direct the decisions and responses of the board and management, has been widely agreed to be concentrated on ‘enhancing corporate profit and shareholder gain.’8 Quite frequently this is understood as ‘maximising shareholder value,’9 and quite frequently as well can be understood as allowing profit and advantage today to the detriment of profit and advantage in the future. Indeed, temporary shareholder profit and corporate advantage is simpler to determine and easier to integrate in corporate decision making and could even be reasonable to quick fix or temporary shareholders.10 However, an exclusively short-range focus may result in inadequate ventures in training and innovation, for instan ce, so that potential competitive advantage is risked, to the absolute loss of the shareholders.11 Due to these grounds, defining the corporate objective only in relation to ‘maximising shareholder value’ is not enough. A more adequate way to define the corporate objective is ‘maximising wealth creating potential.’12 This is tantamount to sustaining the company for the gain of every shareholder by pursuing actual long-term economic growth. Theorising Corporate Governance Two major features of present-day companies are the distribution of equity among shareholders, and the separation of control and ownership.13 The concept of agency cost is defined by Jensen and Meckling (1976) as the ‘sum of (1) the monitoring expenditures of the principal, (2) the bonding expenditures by the agent, and (3) the residual loss.’14 Agency costs, more particularly, may comprise the direct losses of advantages or assets and/or expropriation because of managerial ine ptitude or lenience.15 Management, as argued by Shleifer and Vishny (1997), can carry out asset expropriation in a variety of ways, such as directly pilfering wealth from the accounts of the company, transferring the assets of the company through ‘subjective’ pricing to their own companies, or trading valuable company resources to their own companies at low prices.16 However, management lenience could be the more unfavourable kind of agency cost. Management may boost their purchase of luxuries at the expense of the company, or raise their position by enlarging the company’s size even though the expansion is not justified on competence bases.17 The direct expropriation of a company’