The importance of good corporate governance for achieving sustained productivity growth and longer-term development is widely recognised. Enhanced corporate governance can not only improve the allocation of real investment resources (physical, human and technological capital) but also, and most importantly, greatly reduce the wastage of these resources.

In the transition from relatively inward-oriented and undemocratic systems of economic and political governance to much more open, market-friendly and democratic ones-a process that most developing countries are now going through-disciplinary pressures are brought to bear more effectively on corporate managers.

The Centre's research also points to the importance, and delicate nature, of the interaction among the institutions of corporate governance per se, of market competition (and competition policy) and, where relevant, of sector-specific regulatory bodies to combat powerfully destructive rent-seeking behaviour and regulatory capture.

Studies of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, India, Malaysia and South Africa

also show that policy recommendations must be relatively country-specific in terms both of dosage or balance and implementation of particular measures, to take account of local political, cultural and historical as well as economic and institutional realities.