Corporate governance and firm performance in the emerging market: A review of the empirical literature

Abstract

After decades of many corporate scandals and financial meltdowns, the quest for effective corporate governance and firm performance has raised the concern of a lot of academicians, practitioners, and researchers regarding articles written on this issue. This study seeks to review corporate governance and firm performance articles written in Ghana under the author’s keywords in order to fulfill the objective. The goal is to identify the research trend and then to suggest the idea of future research directions. The study has conducted a review of corporate governance research by searching at Scopus and Web of Science research databases from 2006 to 2020 to prepare the list of articles. A comprehensive review of recent corporate governance and firm performance literature is essential because it provides a basis for comparing Ghana’s corporate governance research experience with other emerging economies in other continents. The findings reveal that two keywords on corporate governance analysed in this study – board composition and ownership – have many written articles, while compensation has the least number of articles. However, in the future, gender diversity and audit committee may be investigated since it has received global attention.