Corporate governance in the Middle East and North Africa: A systematic review of current trends and opportunities for future research

Abstract

Research Question/Issue: We systematically review the corporate governance (CG) literature on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), organize it into six main themes and their subthemes, and propose several opportunities for future research.Research Findings/Insights: We highlight CG's unique characteristics in the MENA region as well as differences and similarities across MENA countries. We shed light on how organizations are governed in this region especially that their ownership structures are centered on families and the state, and that Islam plays a major role in their governance. Our review establishes a solid foundation for future research directed at CG practices in the MENA region and encourages policymakers and practitioners to improve CG in the region.Theoretical/Academic Implications: To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic literature review covering CG in the MENA region. In an effort to encourage the continuing evolution of this research stream and augment its contributions to the broader CG literature, we develop an extensive research agenda focusing on several key topics that deserve further attention such as ownership and countries' political regimes, family business and royal families, Sharia law, and executive compensation, among others.Practitioner/Policy Implications: This review invites policymakers and investors to consider implementing better policies aimed at improving CG practices, specifically by fomenting transparency, developing financial markets, providing stronger protections for minority shareholders, and enhancing compliance with existing and new regulations.corporate governance, board of directors, financial disclosure, Middle East and North Africa (MENA), ownership 1 | INTRODUCTION Corporate governance (CG) research has exploded over the past few decades and adopted different perspectives from management, finance, and sociology, among other fields. Significant corporate scandals, public protests against excessive managerial greed (Dorff, 2014), the recklessness of some major financial institutions leading to the 2008 financial crisis (Aguilera et al., 2016), and heightened attention to sustainability (Jamali et al., 2008) have played a role in scholars' and practitioners' growing interest in CG. This governance

CEO Characteristics, Family Ownership and Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting: The Case of Saudi Arabia

“…Therefore, research carried out in the future could be enriched by investigating the impact of the relationship between different CEO characteristics and CSR, as well as incorporating additional research methods, such as CEO interviews, surveys, and in-depth case studies, to ascertain corporate management's perceptions of CSR participation. Despite the inherent limitations associated with data availability and small sample size that beset most corporate governance studies in the MENA region [104], this study paves the way for future investigations on the heterogeneity of family businesses [105] and other contingency factors that drive the CEO profiles and CSR relationship in the MENA region and elsewhere.…”

Corporate governance looking back to look forward in Pakistan: a review, synthesis and future research agenda

“…The objectives of this paper are to assess and consolidate the extant research about CG and related topics in Pakistan, and to examine the research trends in the CGrelated studies and issues from 2002 to 2020 in Pakistan. So in order to achieve the objectives of the study, this review paper starts with the HEC recognized Pakistani Journals at the first stage and we have reviewed 35 Journals, from these journals the related paper has been extracted these are mentioned in Table 2, in the second stage Google Scholar a bibliographic database and largest academic articles database [8] searches out to find and analyze the related studies, this result 15 related studies starting from 2009 to 2020 in the 14 international journals. Moreover, the first decade of twenty first century in Pakistan is the decade of establishing and launching different management sciences and social sciences journals, the first study was traced back to 2008 in which [16] linked CG characteristics with capital structure decisions.…”

“…In order to achieve the objectives of the study, we have gone through the review of Pakistani academic Journals recognized by the Higher Education Commission (hereafter, HEC) for the period of 2002 to 2020 1 as well as internationally published research work via a systematic literature review approach. The scope of this review paper is the studies related to CG and related topics published within Pakistani journals or international journals outside Pakistan which can be found in google scholar a bibliographic database and the largest academic articles database [8]. Moreover, CG is a very broad and a comprehensive discipline; therefore, this review study specifically focuses on those topics related to CG such as ownership structure, board structure, audit structure, CEO and board of directors' roles & functions, CEO & board of directors' features and family ownership, in addition to this, family business groups, business groups affiliation and earnings management-related studies are also included which may be linked with various types of dependent(predicated) variables.…”

World-class universities: past and future

“…Other systematic literature review studies have also been limited by selecting only papers meeting Q1 journal criteria (Valverde-Berrocoso et al. , 2020; Farah et al. , 2021).…”

“…Second, this study only explores papers published in SJR Q1 journals. Other systematic literature review studies have also been limited by selecting only papers meeting Q1 journal criteria (Valverde-Berrocoso et al, 2020;Farah et al, 2021). Future potential research on this topic should consider using work published in other journals.…”