This book explores the ways in which systems of corporate governance, especially in the major industrialized states, influence the globalization process. Deepening integration, which increases levels of policy, as well as structural interdependence, results from the transnational activities of mainly US, Japanese and European firms. These enterprises evolved within national political economies that have distinctive cultures, structures, laws and financial systems. The formative effects of these differing political economies tend to endure. But globalizing product markets, and especially financial markets, create pressures for convergence in corporate governance, organizational development and strategies. They push questions of corporate governance from the back pages of recondite journals onto the front pages of the business press and into central arenas of international economic policymaking