Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
2-2020
Abstract
The World Bank’s influential Doing Business Report (DBR) has been a key platform for the American-driven dissemination of global norms of good corporate governance. A prominent part of the DBR is the related party transactions (RPT) index, which ranks 190 jurisdictions from around the world on the quality of their laws regulating RPTs. According to the RPT Index, the regulation of RPTs in Commonwealth Asia’s most important economies is stellar. In the 2018 RPT Index, Singapore ranked 1st, Hong Kong and Malaysia tied for 3rd, and India came in at 20th. However, despite the uniformly high RPT Index scores in all of Commonwealth Asia’s most important economies, empirical, case-study, and anecdotal evidence overwhelmingly suggests that there are in practice significant inter-jurisdictional and intra-jurisdictional differences in the actual function and regulation of RPTs in Commonwealth Asia. In this article, we assert that the conspicuous gap between what the RPT Index suggests should be occurring and what is actually occurring in Commonwealth Asia exists because it fails to capture the complexity of RPTs in three respects, which we term: (1) regulatory complexity; (2) shareholder complexity; and, (3) normative complexity. First, it appears that the RPT Index overly emphasizes the role played by a jurisdiction’s formal corporate and securities laws in determining the effectiveness of its RPT regulation, and it fails to pay due regard to its corporate culture and rule of law norms in determining the efficiency of its RPT regulation. Second, the RPT Index erroneously assumes that controlling shareholders are a homogeneous group driven by similar incentives. Third, the general assumption that RPTs per se are evidence of defective corporate governance and that stricter regulation of RPTs consequently equates to “good law” is erroneous. Demonstrating the frailties of the RPT Index is important in practice because jurisdictions – especially developing ones – commonly look to the DBR and its indices when reforming their laws. In addition, the RPT Index is built on some of the most influential research in the field of comparative corporate law, which makes our challenge to the validity of the RPT Index academically significant.
Keywords
Comparative corporate law and governance, Related party transactions, Commonwealth Asia, World bank Doing Business Report, Legal origins theory
Discipline
Business Organizations Law
Research Areas
Asian and Comparative Legal Systems
Publication
Berkeley Business Law Journal
Volume
17
Issue
1
ISSN
1548-7067
Identifier
10.15779/Z38JQ0SV9J
Publisher
University of California, Berkeley School of Law
Citation
PUCHNIAK, Dan W. and VAROTTIL, Umakanth.
Related party transactions in commonwealth Asia: Complicating the comparative paradigm. (2020). Berkeley Business Law Journal. 17, (1),.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sol_research/4381
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Comments
Selected as one of ten papers for presentation at the 2019 Global Corporate Governance Colloquia (http://gcgc.global), which is widely recognized as the world’s leading corporate governance conference Reviewed and described as standing out as “the clarion critique” of one of the most important debates in comparative law and corporate governance: https://intl.jotwell.com/intransigent-indices-and-the-laments-of-comparative-law-why-legal-origins-wont-die/ Included as a required reading in Mariana Pargendler’s comparative corporate governance course at Yale Law School in AY2018-2019