Transparency and disclosure as a corporate governance mechanism and corporate performance: Egypt's case

Our paper aims to examine the impact of an “objective” measure for the quality of transparency and disclosure practice that is extracted from the Egyptian corporate governance guidelines on the performance of a selected sample of 85 Egyptian listed companies. We use mixed methods (i.e. content analysis, regression analysis, questionnaires and interviews) to test the relationship between the transparency and disclosure index and corporate performance for the period 2006-2010. We found no significant relationship between transparency and disclosure practice and corporate performance. Our results suggest that governance mechanisms such as transparency and disclosure practices are considered to be just ink on paper without any actual value added adopting corporate governance in Egypt.