Abstract

Corporate governance is an issue of growing importance in developing economies, as many firms pass through significant transformations due to the combined forces of sociopolitical changes, technological progress and economic trends toward globalization. These elements, along with the structural characteristics of developing economies such as less developed capital markets and governmental interventionism, draw a picture for corporate governance practices that may, in some aspects, be fundamentally different from the practices found in European or North American contexts. In this paper we review and discuss the state of corporate governance practices in Brazil, focusing on how the governance structure of Brazilian firms has been subjected to important changes in the recent past and how even more changes are expected to happen.