Corporate governance disclosures in the New Zealand agricultural companies

Abstract

Livestock, agriculture, and horticulture products are essential in the New Zealand economic sustainable development. Consequently performance and governance of active companies in these areas of business are constantly monitored by the public through legislators, stock market, government agencies, and media. Practically corporate governance disclosures are providing essential information for such monitoring and analysis. This paper intention includes critically evaluate corporate governance disclosures of agriculture companies. Implementation of the content analysis methodology enables this research project to present analysis of the level of compliance with the 2004 Corporate Governance Principles and Guidelines that put forwarded by the New Zealand Stock Exchange (governance related disclosure and their non-listed counterpart as expected providing even less disclosure in this area. The financial and governance reports of these companies are suffering from deficient transparency in the area of corporate governance.

Corporate governance structures and firm performance in large agriculture companies in New Zealand

“…Before proceeding to study the second objective, we first compare the results obtained from Roudaki and Shahwan's (2017) paper about the quality of CG disclosures in New Zealand agricultural companies and then present the empirical results, for equation (1), to…”

“…Nevertheless, this positive relationship, while is interesting and observed in all listed companies, it is anticipated that large listed and non-listed agricultural companies, which are the centre of interest in the current research, may exhibit different behaviour. Because non-listed companies implement CG guidelines voluntarily, the observation shows that, in general, large New Zealand agricultural companies are not good at implementing and disclosing CGC (Roudaki and Shahwan, 2017). The New Zealand economy is smaller and healthier than Australia, the USA and the UK, which suffer from financial scandals, nevertheless, there is concern about poor firm performance (Reddy, 2010;Reddy et al, 2010).…”

“…The CG quality disclosures of the New Zealand agricultural listed and non-listed companies are presented in Columns 2 and 5 of Table II. These columns are extracted from Roudaki and Shahwan's, (2017) paper about the quality of CG disclosures in New Zealand agricultural companies. The percentages in Columns 2 and 5 indicate the level of implementations of the New Zealand CG guideline's best practices by related companies.…”

“…This study is a continuing research project about the quality of CG disclosures in New Zealand's agricultural companies (Roudaki and Shahwan, 2017). Content analysis revealed that, on average, in NZ agricultural companies, CG disclosures are on the low side.…”

“…This lower level of CG disclosure motivated the present research to explore the contributing factors by extending the previous research project. To do so, this research established two objectives: first, it compares the findings of Roudaki and Shahwan's (2017) CG disclosure scores with the financial attributes of the same NZ agriculture firms; and second, it examines the impact of CG characteristics on firms' financial performance by drawing on the agency theory framework.…”