英语论文网

e. While foreign donors may be talking about a set of anti-monopoly economic policies the reformers on the other end may perceive such reforms as something completely different. Further complicating the picture is the fact that economic and political systems are non-ergodic - i.e. constantly changing - and Douglass North has cautioned against ignoring this fact in any economic analysis [3] :

I wish to emphasize the limits to our understanding because there is a certain amount of hubris evident in the annual surveys by the World Bank and in the writing of orthodox economists who think we now have it right. It is important for us to understand that even if we do have it right for one economy, it will not necessarily be right for another, and that even if we have it right today, it will not necessarily be right tomorrow.

The alternative approach, of course, is to facilitate the process of institutional change in the country, based on some set of general international experiences or principles but grounded solidly in the local reality. This does not guarantee perfect outcomes - bad policy decisions are still possible - but it does mitigate the dangers of applying static economic models to a constantly changing economic environments and ignoring institutional factors that cannot be observed looking at economic and political systems from the outside.

Corporate Governance: You Can't Reform It If You Can't Say It
The cognition issue is precisely the problem CIPE faced in the Middle East and North Africa when it launched corporate governance programs there in early 2000s. CIPE began working on corporate governance in the MENA region following the increased attention being paid to the role of private sector investment at the turn of this millennium.

As countries in the region increasingly began looking for investment - domestic, regional, and international - poor governance on the level of companies quickly emerged as an issue of concern. For instance, early research by McKinsey indicated that investors were willing to pay a 30 percent premium for well governed companies in Egypt. [4] Moreover, the importance of corporate governance goes far beyond the performance and investment worthiness of individual firms. Private sector governance mechanisms are instrumental in reducing corruption, promoting democratic values of transparency and accountability, fundamentally changing the nature of relationships between business and state, and promoting broader private sector development and job creation.

Although a few leading edge companies in MENA certainly recognized the benefits of good governance, a consistent effort had to be put into creating a critical mass of firms that would be able to drive much needed reforms. This was one of the challenges CIPE encountered early on in trying to help institute better corporate governance in the region. The most significant of those challenges, however, was the fact that there was no single term in Arabic for corporate governance. In order to express this important concept, business leaders would either have to say it in English, or use one of several imprecise Arabic terms such as tahakkum ('rule,' 'regulation,' or 'control'), sultat al-edara (literally 'authorities of management'), al hakemeya (which has a well known Islamic connotation meaning that God is the only source of law and regulation), or Al-edara al-rashida (literally 'r