Corporate governance and firm performance in Africa: does one size fit all across sectors?

Baah Aye Kusi and Vera Ogeh Lassey Fiador

Chapter 3 in The Elgar Companion to Financial Economics, 2025, pp 36-65 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: The relevance of corporate governance in maximizing firm performance has informed the introduction/adoption of generic corporate governance codes, rules, guidelines, and regulations by policymakers and regulators. However, given differences in management style (shareholder/ stakeholder value maximization approaches), sectoral operations and cycles, corporate governance structures guidelines, rules, codes, and regulations may not adequately specify/inform the needs of different sectors and should take a contingency approach. It is against this background that this study tests and highlights the sectoral variations in the effects of corporate governance structures on stakeholder and shareholder profits in Africa while using 369 listed firms between 2008 and 2020 across five sectoral clusters of firms in the finance, material, consumer staples, industrial and consumer discretionary sectors. The results show that corporate governance structures have widely varying effects across industries and management style approaches (stakeholder and shareholder value maximizations) suggesting that one size cannot fit all sectors in the context of corporate governance and that corporate governance should take a contingency approach. These findings indicate that: (i) the development and design of corporate governance cannot take the one-size-fits-all approach; (ii) there is a need for regulators and policymakers to desist from developing and implementing wholesale corporate governance codes and regulations and rather focus on sector-specific governance structures to derive the best out of corporate governance structures; and (iii) corporate managers must adopt, contextualize, and implement corporate governance structures in a manner that synchronizes with and best fits their firm's needs.

Keywords: Corporate governance; Performance; Sectors; Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035341399
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