ASEAN Corporate Governance Scorecard: Benchmarking Philippines' corporate governance

FOR INVESTORS, confidence is currency.

- - Bjorn Biel M. Beltran

How they feel about the market, its prospects, and its foundations determines the ebb and flow of liquidity. In the Philippines, that confidence rests increasingly on how companies govern themselves.The ASEAN Corporate Governance Scorecard (ACGS), adopted locally over a decade ago, has become a benchmark for how Philippine firms demonstrate ethical conduct, protect shareholder rights, and attract long-term capital.

Recognizing the importance of corporate governance, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) introduced the scorecard as a framework to enhance corporate governance practices in its member countries.

Established by the ASEAN Capital Markets Forum and the Asian Development Bank in 2011 to raise corporate governance standards, ACGS serves as an instrument for assessing and ranking publicly listed companies in six participating ASEAN countries, namely Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.

The scorecard system is based on international best practices, encouraging publicly listed companies (PLCs) to go beyond national legislative requirements, giving greater global visibility to well-governed ASEAN PLCs and promoting ASEAN as an asset class.