Annual Reports Of Listed Companies Research Articles

Good corporate governance: evidence from Fijian listed entities

Good Corporate Governance is the process of how the companies are directed and controlled. In Today’s market- based economy, corporations make a significant contribution to the gross domestic product. Good corporate governance means that corporations are run in the best interest of the members and the other stakeholders. Therefore, Good Corporate Governance has become an integral requirement in today’s fast changing, competitive and global economy. The scandals and failure of big corporate giants such as Enron, Arthur Anderson, Worldcom and HIH to name a few, calls for Accounting discipline to hold liability. The applicable Accounting standards including International financial reporting standards and the way accounting is practiced may open doors for corrupted Accountants. This paper examines corporate governance from an accounting perspective and suggests ways on how corporation’s valuable assets and corporate image can be protected by applying the best accounting practices and recommendations from capital markets unit of Reserve Bank of Fiji on good corporate governance. This paper uses a content analysis approach and examines the corporate governance practices from the annual reports of listed companies in Fiji.

Determinants of voluntary disclosures in Kenyan companies annual reports

In recent years, the Kenyan Government has initiated reforms at the Nairobi Stock Exchange aimed at transforming the exchange into a vehicle for mobilising domestic savings and attracting foreign capital investments. Consequently, the corporate financial reporting, and in particular, the level of voluntary disclosure is a vital part of the process for building investor confidence (local and foreign) and trust. Drawing on prior corporate disclosure research, this study examines factors associated with voluntary disclosure of four types of information: general and strategic, financial, forward-looking, and social and board information in the annual reports of Kenyan companies. This study provides longitudinal examination of voluntary disclosure practices in the annual reports of listed companies in Kenya from 1992 to 2001. The study investigates the extent to which corporate governance attributes, ownership structure and company characteristics influence voluntary disclosure of various types of information. Due to the panel nature of our data, to estimate the determinants of voluntary disclosure of various types of information, we use pooled Ordinary Least Square (OLS) with Panel-Corrected Standard Errors (PCSEs). Our results indicate that, disclosures of all types of information are influenced by corporate governance attributes, ownership structure and corporate characteristics. In particular, the results also suggest that size and companies in the agricultural sector are significantly associated with the voluntary disclosure of all four types of information disclosures. Keywords: Voluntary disclosures, companies’ annual reports, Kenya