Annotation This report points the way to the establishment of trust and the encouragement of enterprise. It marks an important milestone in the development of corporate governance, and I cannot commend it too highly.--Sir Adrian Cadbury, London Recently, in Russia, a large share of the profits of an oil company was siphoned off by its controlling shareholder, leaving the company in debt to its creditors, employees, and the state. In the Czech Republic, millions of small shareholders lost their right to fair capital gains as tunneling schemes by insiders stripped privatized companies of their assets. Increasingly for developing and transition economies, a healthy and competitive corporate sector is fundamental for sustained and shared growth-sustained in that it withstands economic shocks, shared in that it delivers benefits to all of society. Presently, many developing and transition economies lack the supporting institutions and human resources so critical to sound corporate governance. The challenge for them is to adapt systems of corporate governance to their own corporate structures and implementation capacities, public and private, to create a culture of enforcement and compliance. For the first time, this report incorporates a framework that encompasses the widely differing regimes--political, economic, and social-within which corporations carry on their activities around the world. It recognizes the complexity of the concept of corporate governance and therefore focuses on the principles on which it is based.