By unhappy coincidence, the row unleashed by institutional investors over executive pay at Royal Mail last week came just after the unveiling of the UK’s newly revised corporate governance code. It was a salutary reminder that egregious boardroom pay awards remain endemic despite repeated reform efforts on both sides of the Atlantic.
An underlying message that should also be heeded is that abstruse matters of corporate governance and company law can have explosive political and economic consequences, most notably through their impact on inequality. Bad governance is an under-acknowledged factor in the populist tide that threw up US president Donald Trump, Brexit and much else besides.
Admittedly, the connection between flawed governance and inequality is not straightforward. In the UK, income inequality as measured by the widely used Gini coefficient rose considerably in the 1980s when the Thatcher government was dramatically reducing income tax rates. Inequality has since fallen, though it remains well above its 1970s levels.