A Common Corporate Governance Code - Mission Impossible?

Abstract: The corporate governance codes are a way of creating trust for companies in national financial markets. The problem with implementing different codes within the European Union has lead to that the trust has been increased for the companies within the different countries but not internationally, within the European Union. This means that investors will have to look into each country code to decide if a company existing in a financial marketplace can be trusted. A resolution for creating trust internationally could be to create a common code for the European Union. Therefore the aim of our research is through a comparison of different corporate governance codes and institutional systems analyse what similarities and differences the codes and the systems have with each other and through our conclusions make a judgement if it is possible to unite the codes into one common code in the European Union. To reach our aim we made three different analyses. In the first analysis we compared four European corporate governance codes (the British, German, Spanish and Swedish) and concluded in which areas we thought the codes could be united. In our second analysis we compared the institutional systems in each of these four countries and concluded the main characteristics of each system that could influence the corporate governance codes. In our third analysis we tried to explain the differences in the codes by the differences in the institutional systems and through the comparison conclude in which parts the codes could be united and in which parts not.