Book Description

There is a large variation in the quality of corporate governance practices adopted by firms even when they are subject to the same contractual environment. Therefore, it is possible that firms within the same country have widely divergent standards of overall corporate governance. This leads to the fact that different Indian firms could have varying standards of corporate governance disclosure. The present study aims to provide an understanding of corporate governance disclosure levels of Indian companies in the private and public sector. It provides useful insights into comparing and contrasting corporate governance practices of public and private sector companies in India by developing a Corporate Governance Disclosure Score (CGDS). Research in the field of corporate governance disclosure during recent years has mainly focused on the disclosure practices in the annual reports of firms. In conducting this research also, annual reports for the year 2008-2009 of 77 listed Indian companies have been used as a main source of information. While 48 of these companies belong to the private sector, 29 belong to the public sector. The sample is drawn from across eight industries. The study uses the univariate parametric t-test and non-parametric Mann Whitney test for comparing means, and the results indicate that there is a significant difference between the CGDSs of public and private sector companies in India.