In recent years, the Kurtzman Group, a global consulting
firm, has refined and extended the opacity index to
incorporate 65 variables. In the group’s survey in 2004,
Finland and the United Kingdom ranked highest for
transparencywhileVenezuela,Lebanon,andIndonesiawere
atthebottomoftherankings.Ingeneral,theyfindthatpoorer
countries score worse on theopacity indexthan wealthier
countries.
18
Governance and Disclosure Indexes
The accounting scandals that engulfed Enron, Tyco, and
WorldComand theensuing anxiety amonginvestors about
accountingmanipulation ledto numerous services offering
measures of how fully firms were disclosing information.
Standard & Poor’s (S&P), for instance, created a new
governanceinformationandanalyticalservicethatlookedat
the corporate disclosure patterns of more than 1,500
companies listed globally on three dimensions—ownership
structure, financial information, and board/management
structure.
19 Appendix16.1summarizesthequestionsthatS&Pasked
incomingupwithdisclosurescoresoneachdimension.The
scoresacrossregionsoneachdimensionaresummarizedin
Table 16.3(for 2002).
TABLE 16.3 Transparency and Disclosure Rankings of
Companies by Region