STRENGTHENING THE CORPORATE GOVERNANCE OF STATUTORY BOARDS IN SINGAPORE: AN EXPLORATORY COMPARATIVE STUDY

Abstract

This study is motivated by the lack of research on the corporate governance of statutory boards in Singapore. The exploratory comparative study examines the corporate governance of autonomous arm’s-length bodies (ALBs) in Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom (UK), and introduces a scorecard to measure the quality of their corporate governance. The scorecard covers seven areas relevant to the governance of these autonomous ALBs. The entities are awarded points for providing quality disclosures and abiding by good governance practices. The study is based on hand-collected data from the entities’ annual reports, governance documents, corporate websites and government websites among others. I used the data collected to determine how each country performs with respect to the others and identify good practices in the seven areas. I also used the data to ascertain if there is a relationship between quality of governance and quality of disclosure, entity size and quality of disclosure, and entity size and overall quality of corporate governance. The methods used to analyse the data include measures of spread, measures of central tendency, Spearman rank correlation coefficient and a regression model. My analysis indicates that the UK has the highest overall quality of corporate governance while Singapore has the lowest. I found that there is a strong positive relationship between the quality of disclosure and quality of governance, and entity size and quality of disclosure. The association between entity size and overall quality of corporate governance is weak. This study has demonstrated a need for statutory boards in Singapore to improve on the quality of its corporate governance and provided recommendations for how this can be achieved.