Voluntary corporate governance disclosures in the annual reports: an empirical study

Abstract

Corporate governance (CG) disclosure is a fundamental theme of the ‘modern’ corporate-regulatory system, which encompasses providing ‘governance’ information to the public in a variety of ways. This study explores the voluntary CG practices of 50 corporations, over and above the mandatory requirements of clause 49 of the listing agreement. In order to study the voluntary CG disclosure practices, a ‘content analysis’ was done, and finally, a ‘CG disclosure’ index was prepared. We have primarily used ‘secondary’ sources of information, both from the ‘report on CG’ and the ‘annual reports’ for the financial year 2003–2004 and 2004–2005. As a part of voluntary CG disclosure, a total of 40 items have been selected from the CG section of the annual reports and proxy forms. In order to provide a comparison ‘across’ industries, corporations have been selected from four industries, viz., software, textiles, sugar and paper. Appropriate statistical tools and techniques have been applied for the analysis. It has been observed that “corporations are following less than 50 percent of the items of CG disclosure index. Moreover, there is no significant difference among the disclosure scores across the four industries”.

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