Corporate governance and voluntary disclosure in Kuwait

Failure of high profile companies such as Enron, World.com had initiated a call for an investigation to analyse the reason for such radical consequence to prevent further similar financial crises. One of the common factors identified by the researchers is the poor disclosure, transparency and Corporate Governance (CG) mechanisms. Similar to the UK, the compliance towards CG codes are voluntary for the majority of the countries around the globe including Kuwait. CG codes aimed to improve the governance of a company including transparency. Thus, voluntary disclosure had been examined by numerous academics to emphasise the importance of accountability, transparency that in turn increase the confidence of investors and creditors in the financial markets of emerging economies. This thesis is based on Kuwait, as it is a resource rich country and attracts foreign investments. The Central Bank of Kuwait (CBK) issued instructions for CG mechanism especially to the financial sector in 2004. From the research in hand, there was no longitudinal study in Kuwait concerning the impact of GC mechanism to voluntary disclosure. The sample in this thesis consists of 155 Kuwaiti listed companies from 2007 to 2010, 620 firm-year observations. A self-constructed index was developed to evaluate the level of voluntary disclosure and how it developed over time. Both univariate analysis and multivariate analysis were used. Most of the thesis results were consistent with previous studies; there was a gradual increase in the level of voluntary disclosure and its categories over the observed period. All CG mechanisms findings revealed significant associations with voluntary disclosure, except board size and role duality, have a negative significant association. Ownership structure indicates insignificant association with voluntary disclosure. Firm characteristics have a significant positive association with voluntary disclosure, except profitability, has a significant negative association, while gearing is found an insignificant association. Furthermore, the level of voluntary disclosure in the financial sector is higher than the non-financial sector. The contributions to knowledge in this thesis are; 1) It is the first empirical longitudinal study in Kuwait concerning voluntary disclosure, and its relationship with GC mechanism, ownership structure and firm characteristics, as far as the researcher is aware. 2) It provided evidence of the importance of CG to enhancing the level of voluntary disclosure in Kuwait business environment, especially that the level of voluntary disclosure in the financial sector is higher than the non-financial sector. 3) Employed many quantitative methods, such as OSL regression, Normal score, GLS regression, Tobit regression and Quantile regression (divided into 25%, 50% and 75%). 4) A self-constructed index, which was developed in this thesis, could be suitable for other Arab Gulf countries that are similar in the business environment and experiencing the same economic changes. 5) Provides evidence of the possibility of employing the disclosure theories derived from developed countries in emerging countries. 6) It is possible to generalise the results of the disclosure index to other companies not investigated in this thesis. Moreover, this thesis implies that the legislative and regulatory authorities, in particular, the capital markets authority Kuwaiti, need to increase efforts to enhance the role of corporate governance practices in Kuwaiti listed companies.