The relationship between state ownership, foreign ownership and corporate governance in listed firms of Vietnam

Abstract

In recent decades, corporate governance has taken a vital role in managing effectively firms especially since the Asia crisis in 1997 and the world wide crisis in 2008. Nowadays, there are a significant volume of literatures related to the corporate governance issue all over the world, and researches about this topic has become more and more deeply and diversified. Moreover, corporate governance is considered as a helpful approach to construct the basic qualification and strengthen the economy from inside.

In particular, in the context of economic crisis on over the world, Vietnam economy has also face with the economic recession. Many firms has been bankrupted and collapsed. Moreover, Vietnam has still been in the early stage of privatization process, so it requires update regulation to support for the corporate governance’s implement and get healthier economy. In that condition, corporate governance is concerned significantly in Vietnam nowadays. However, at the present, corporate governance is still a new concept in Vietnam and there has just a little amount of academic researches about this topic. Because of these reasons, research about corporate governance and related factors play a remarkable role in the economic development of Vietnam. Hence, this study is constructed to examine the effect of two important factors-state ownership and foreign ownership-on the corporate governance. Data are collected from the listed firms in Ho Chi Minh stock exchange in 2010. Using software to test the research framework and hypothesis, and analyze the data through descriptive analysis, correlation coefficients analysis, and multiple regression analysis.

In conclusion, the research results indicate that the state ownership have a significant negative relationship with corporate governance while the foreign ownership have a positive one. In addition, the empirical results show that the average corporate governance of all listed firms is rather low, just gets the score at 47.61%.