Legal Origin and Corporate Governance for Chinese Family Business: Evidence in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China

Abstract

This paper aims to examine if the difference of legal traditions make different corporate governance regimes for protecting interest of listed family enterprises’ shareholders through evaluating and comparing corporate governance regimes in the Greater China region, including Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China. The result is consistent with the LLSV paper, i.e. common law tradition constitute better corporate governance regime. We also find that countries with civil law traditions can be enhance the quality of the corporate governance regime through legal and financial reforms, and through adopting some measures which is commonly found in companies govern by common law tradition.