Corporate Governance Disclosure in Annual Financial Reports and Company Performance - Evidence from Saudi Arabia

Abstract

The aim of this research is to find the relationship between disclosure in annual reports as outlined in the corporate governance regulations imposed by the Saudi Capital Market Authority and companies' performance in Saudi Arabia. To achieve that, the corporate governance disclosure regulations are classified into four categories; Ownership structure and shareholders' rights; board of directors' information; financial information; operational information. Each category included several variables that are disclosed on the annual reports. This research is conducted on three sectors (Banking, Cement and Multi-Investment) to measure the relationship between those variables and company performance measured by three measures, namely Return on Assets (ROA), Return on Equity (ROE) and Price to Earnings ratio (PE). The results revealed that both ROE and ROA correlate with some of the disclosure variables. However, these variables differ from one sector to the other. Very few variables correlate with the PE ratio. The result confirms results achieved by previous studies conducted on the local and international level.