IT IS said that management trends take about five years to pass from the private to the public sector; which suggests that the private sector has been remarkably slow to adopt democracy. Now two economists, Professor Bruno Frey and Dr Matthias Benz, from the University of Zurich, say that it is time to use the principles of democratic politics to restore confidence in the corporate world in the wake of widely publicised scandals and fat-cat pay excesses. In the latest edition of the Economic Journal they write that corporate governance could benefit from the introduction of the following democratic stalwarts: