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The purpose of this paper is to investigate new welfare indicators, which no longer rely solely on the gross domestic product but provide a more holistic understanding of welfare encompassing aspects such as health status, social inclusion or environmental quality. So far, it remains, however, questionable to what degree these new indicators can serve as an actual political morality.

To assess this question, this paper proposes to turn to the distinction between right-based, duty-based and goal-based approaches. Assessing welfare in these terms not only suggests itself because of the consequentialist connotations of those alternative formulations that call for happiness or well-being, but also because the distinction allows to consider them in view of some of the central social goods and concerns.

The analysis shows mixed results. It, first, shows that welfare as political morality is best captured in terms of goals. Still, whatever new indicator one chooses, it must not be conceived as a mere aggregation of particular interests, nor should individuals be sacrificed for the sake of an overall good. This makes it important that subjective rights that function as a counterweight are strengthened.

The assessment of the new welfare indicators in these terms has not been undertaken so far, although they fit the purpose ideally. Thus, from the originality of the method, the originality of the findings follows so that the analysis provides neat categories and conclusions.

For the past two and half decades, there has been a marked shift in the corporate governance regulations around the world. The change is more remarkable in developing countries where countries with little or no corporate governance regime have adopted “world class” standards. While there can be a debate on whether law in books actually translates into law in action, in the meantime it might be interesting to analyse the law in books to understand how the corporate governance regime has evolved in the past 20 years. This paper quantitatively tracks 21 countries, most of them being developing and emerging economies, over a period of 20 years. The period covers 1995 to 2014; thus, it traverses the pre and post crisis period in 1999 and 2008. Thus, the paper also provides a snapshot of the macrolegal changes that the countries engage in hoping to stave off the next crisis. The paper uses over 50 parameters modelled on the OECD Principles of Corporate Governance. The paper confirms the suspicion that corporate governance norms around the developing economies are converging on shareholder primacy end of the continuum. The rate of convergence was highest just before the financial crisis of 2008 and has since then slowed down.

The paper uses data collected from experts. They filled up detailed questionnaire which quizzed them on the rules relating to corporate governance norms in their country and asked them to retrospectively check their data every five years for the past 20 years. This provided an excellent overview as to how the law has evolved in the past two decades on corporate governance. The data were then tabulated using a scoring sheet and then was put together using item response theory (IRT) which is a Bayesian method similar to factor analysis. The paper then follows a comparative approach using heatmaps to analyse the evolution of corporate governance in developing countries.

Corporate governance norms around the developing economies are converging on shareholder primacy end of the continuum. The rate of convergence was highest just before the financial crisis of 2008 and has since then slowed down.

This is the first time that corporate governance panel data analysis has been carried out on top developing countries across so many parameters for such a long period. This paper also uses Bayesian IRT modelling to analyse the evolution which is novel in its approach especially in the corporate governance literature. The paper thus provides a clear view on the evolution of corporate governance norms and how they are converging on a particular ideology.