Finance ministers from the G8 countries have pledged to create a new international code of corporate governance, recognizing that poor board governance was a major cause of the financial crisis.

Concluding a summit held in the Italian town of Lecce, the ministers published what they called “The Lecce Framework,” a document that committed them to creating a global set of common principles and standards for governance.

But the ministers’ statement had no detail about what the code would contain or who would write it (the G8 has no permanent secretariat). And it didn’t mention a similar project launched recently by the OECD, which has its own, widely used set of international governance standards.

Italian Economic and Financial Affairs Minister Giulio Tremonti said the Lecce Framework “is a development” on previous agreements but would be “much more ambitious.”

Governance is top of the agenda, but the framework also covers market integrity, financial regulation and supervision, tax cooperation, and transparency of macroeconomic policy and data. Specific issues it will deal with include: executive compensation, regulation of systemically important institutions, credit rating agencies, accounting standards, the cross-border exchange of information, bribery, tax havens, non-cooperative jurisdictions, money laundering and the financing of terrorism, and the quality and dissemination of economic and financial data.

The G8 nations are Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.