Pay Without Performance
Pay Without Performance

Author: Lucian A. Bebchuk

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9780674020634

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The company is under-performing, its share price is trailing, and the CEO gets...a multi-million-dollar raise. This story is familiar, for good reason: as this book clearly demonstrates, structural flaws in corporate governance have produced widespread distortions in executive pay. Pay without Performance presents a disconcerting portrait of managers' influence over their own pay--and of a governance system that must fundamentally change if firms are to be managed in the interest of shareholders. Lucian Bebchuk and Jesse Fried demonstrate that corporate boards have persistently failed to negotiate at arm's length with the executives they are meant to oversee. They give a richly detailed account of how pay practices--from option plans to retirement benefits--have decoupled compensation from performance and have camouflaged both the amount and performance-insensitivity of pay. Executives' unwonted influence over their compensation has hurt shareholders by increasing pay levels and, even more importantly, by leading to practices that dilute and distort managers' incentives. This book identifies basic problems with our current reliance on boards as guardians of shareholder interests. And the solution, the authors argue, is not merely to make these boards more independent of executives as recent reforms attempt to do. Rather, boards should also be made more dependent on shareholders by eliminating the arrangements that entrench directors and insulate them from their shareholders. A powerful critique of executive compensation and corporate governance, Pay without Performance points the way to restoring corporate integrity and improving corporate performance.

Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2020
Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2020

Author: World Bank

Publisher: World Bank Publications

Published: 2020-12-23

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1464816034

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This edition of the biennial Poverty and Shared Prosperity report brings sobering news. The COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic and its associated economic crisis, compounded by the effects of armed conflict and climate change, are reversing hard-won gains in poverty reduction and shared prosperity. The fight to end poverty has suffered its worst setback in decades after more than 20 years of progress. The goal of ending extreme poverty by 2030, already at risk before the pandemic, is now beyond reach in the absence of swift, significant, and sustained action, and the objective of advancing shared prosperity—raising the incomes of the poorest 40 percent in each country—will be much more difficult. Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2020: Reversals of Fortune presents new estimates of COVID-19's impacts on global poverty and shared prosperity. Harnessing fresh data from frontline surveys and economic simulations, it shows that pandemic-related job losses and deprivation worldwide are hitting already poor and vulnerable people hard, while also shifting the profile of global poverty to include millions of 'new poor.' Original analysis included in the report shows that the new poor are more urban, better educated, and less likely to work in agriculture than those living in extreme poverty before COVID-19. It also gives new estimates of the impact of conflict and climate change, and how they overlap. These results are important for targeting policies to safeguard lives and livelihoods. It shows how some countries are acting to reverse the crisis, protect those most vulnerable, and promote a resilient recovery. These findings call for urgent action. If the global response fails the world's poorest and most vulnerable people now, the losses they have experienced to date will be minimal compared with what lies ahead. Success over the long term will require much more than stopping COVID-19. As efforts to curb the disease and its economic fallout intensify, the interrupted development agenda in low- and middle-income countries must be put back on track. Recovering from today's reversals of fortune requires tackling the economic crisis unleashed by COVID-19 with a commitment proportional to the crisis itself. In doing so, countries can also plant the seeds for dealing with the long-term development challenges of promoting inclusive growth, capital accumulation, and risk prevention—particularly the risks of conflict and climate change.