Governance: giant steps ahead for South East Asia

CORPORATE governance reforms in Asean began with the release of the Finance Committee Report on Corporate Governance in Malaysia in February 1999 and the publication of the Malaysian Code of Corporate Governance in March 2000. This was followed by Singapore's first Code of Corporate Governance, developed by the Corporate Governance Committee and published by the Ministry of Finance, in April 2001. Other founding members of Asean also released codes of corporate governance in the early 2000s - Indonesia in 2001 and Thailand and the Philippines in 2002. They all have since revised their codes. Some other Asean countries have since embarked or are about to embark on their own governance journey.

In charting the path that a particular country takes, it is useful to distinguish between four different phases of the governance journey:

The accompanying table shows the key phases and what I see as the key action steps needed and their drivers. The different phases do overlap and can occur concurrently. For example, even if awareness of good corporate governance as a whole is high in a market, it must be ongoing as new companies, directors and other stakeholders participate in the capital markets.