Building a corporate governance index (JCGI) for an emerging market: case of Jordan

Abstract

A comprehensive corporate governance index (JCGI, 0–100) is constructed to measure the quality of corporate governance practices of the universe of publicly traded Jordanian firms during 2018–2019. We survey all firms' corporate governance practices and manually collect governance data for listed corporations in Amman Stock Exchange to construct the first JCGI, which comprises five sub-indices and 60 elements.The results show that Jordanian companies did not progress in the corporate governance reform during the study period. The overall JCGI mean value is 67.80%. Sub-index results show that governance is weakest in both board procedure and disclosure, with a mean value of 57.36% and 52.43%, respectively. The board procedure subindex shows that most listed firms practice poor governance. Within the board structure sub-index, only 18% of the study sample has the policy to specify the board's professional qualifications and training requirements. Results of shareholders' rights show a rigid and nontransparent environment in the enterprises' control structure.