Corporate governance and the economic performance of non-financial companies in Nigeria

Abstract

Corporate governance has become a great deal of concern for countries in developing economies, with the spate of corporate governance catastrophes and the need to prevent a continuation of this trend. In Nigeria, the call for an enhanced and improved corporate governance practices has seen the development of the Code of Corporate Governance 2011 and now 2018. This is why this study seeks to empirically examine the effects of corporate governance mechanisms on the economic and financial performances of listed non-financial companies in Nigeria from the perspective of board size and CEO duality. A total of 34 companies were selected at random from all sectors of the economy to represent the sample size of this study. Analyses were made for 170 observations for a 5-year period (2014-2018). The data were regressed through fixed effects robust method and the results showed among others a positive and non-significant relationship between board size and economic performance. On the
other hand the result for the relationship between CEO duality and economic performance showed a direct and significant relationship. Therefore, the study recommends that corporate governance principles should be strengthened and given more priority when it comes to the administration of non-financial companies in the public sector in Nigeria.