A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE BOARD EVALUATION IN EUROPEAN ENTITIES: ITALY VS UK

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Abstract

Board evaluation is an evaluation of the performance of the board of directors and its committees, as well as their size, composition and operation. The aim of this paper is to investigate how entities do the evaluation of the performance of the board and how they disclose the self-assessment. We analysed the largest forty constituents of both Italy’s FTSE MIB index and the UK’s FTSE 100 index. The results show that although Corporate Governance Codes’ requirements are similar, implementation of these requirements and the related disclosure continue to show significant differences. The UK companies seem to have a stronger “forward-looking” approach compared to Italian companies. Disclosure provided by Italian companies is too often not enough to enable stakeholder understanding of the process and its outcome. This research contributes to the literature by providing results on the evaluation of boards of directors: regulators, practitioners and researchers must deal with this topic in order to strengthen the rules of corporate governance.

Keywords: Board Evaluation, Corporate Governance Code, European Entities, Non-European Entities, Annual Reports, Descriptive Analysis

How to cite this paper: Busso, D., Devalle, A., & Rizzato, F. (2016). A comparative analysis of the board evaluation in European entities: Italy vs UK. Corporate Ownership & Control, 14(1-4), 578-587. https://doi.org/10.22495/cocv14i1c4art4