Corporate Governance and Compounding Inequality: Shareholder Primacy and Executive Pay

This analysis considers the dimensions of financialization of the international economy and how this has produced a more intensive and integrated mode of accumulation. With the increasing translation of corporations into financial entities, how the dominant shareholder primacy mode of corporate governance has served to compound inequality is examined. The damaging impact of maximising shareholder value is investigated, both in terms of the long term prospects of corporations, but also in aggressively producing increased inequality in the economy and society. Finally the ultimate paradoxical outcome of agency theory and shareholder value is highlighted as the explosion of executive reward in the last two decades in the Anglo-American countries.