With such shareholders behind them, who can blame directors for encouraging management to put profitability above long-term prosperity?Given vast incentives to show profitability, who can then be surprised if management achieves it by selling the company's crown jewels and using all the accounting tricks in the box to inflate earnings?
The taoiseach, Brian Cowen, who as minister for finance under Bertie Ahern connived at vast tax incentives for friendly builders, now sees his own salary cut by 20%.
The mobile telephone industry has offered vast economic incentives for the network service providers.
With all the talk of "performance incentives" the vast majority of the money that athletes earn is guaranteed and not contingent.
The vast majority of federal incentives to increase savings, estimated to exceed $130 billion in 2010, are delivered though the tax code.
But the new man is unlikely to take dictation from Mr Obasanjo, even if the outgoing president does manage to exert a lingering influence.One big problem for Mr Yar'Adua, if he is truly keen to tackle poverty, is that the 36 new state governors, who have vast power, have even less incentive than their predecessors to stop looting their state treasuries.
Ad based revenue sharing is unlikely to be sufficient incentive for the vast majority of any system's users, but that may not be the case for a site's biggest stars.
They predict the country will lose more than $240m annually from tax incentives in coming years, with the vast bulk made up from tax incentives granted to a couple of British mining companies.
This is not necessarily problematic; the vast majority of businesses have incentives to offer more of whatever they sell.
It is impossible to create stable, balanced economies when vast interests within them have every incentive to drag them into instability and imbalance.
