Purpose – The purpose of this research study is to make a comparative analysis between corporate governance guidelines 2016 and 2012 and area of further improvement to ensure better governance, accountability and transparency. Research design, data and methodology - This research study is mainly based on the corporate governance guidelines 2016 and 2012 issued by the regulatory authority known as Bangladesh Securities and Exchange Commission (BSEC). Results - This study finds that corporate governance guideline 2012 include some new issues such as criteria and qualification of independent director; some additional statements in the directors’ report; mandatory requirement of separation of chairman and CEO; constitution of audit committee; chairman of audit committee; role of audit committee, duties of CEO and CFO on financial statements; and collection of compliance certificate from professional accountant or secretary in compare to corporate governance guidelines 2016. Conclusions – This study suggests that the regulatory authority should include more issues such as tax management and reporting, risk management and reporting; individual and overall performance analysis of the board and independent directors; separate nomination and compensation committee; assessment of true independence of the board and its supporting committees to ensure higher quality of corporate governance and transparency.

The purpose of this paper is to review the quality of corporate governance from the prior empirical literature. This study finds that most of the researchers developed the self structured corporate governance index and few researchers used the corporate governance index provided by rating agencies. This study also finds that there is no uniform basis to measure the corporate governance quality and observed the variation in terms of overall and individual attributes of corporate governance; sub-indices of corporate governance; scoring system; weighted and un-weighted method; statistical method; time period; financial and non financial companies; code of corporate governance; listing requirement; disclosure practices; legal environment; firms characteristics; and country perspective. This study also observed that overall corporate governance quality is very low in most of the studies and even quality of corporate governance varies in the firms within the same country. This study recommends that the boundary of corporate governance quality should be defined based on the agreed set of rules and regulation, code of governance and practices. This study also suggests that the regulator and policy makers should more emphasize on code of corporate governance and regulatory framework and monitoring to improve the quality of corporate governance.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to get a clear concept about intellectual capital and reports on intellectual capital in different entities based on the literature review. Research design, data, and methodology - This study was mainly written in a way of descriptive research. The current studies deal with the theoretical and reporting aspects on intellectual capital. Thus, this research is developed on the basis of previous descriptive and empirical research papers. Results - This study finds that intellectual capital is the combination of human capital, structural capital and relational capital but there is no unique measurement system or process to define intellectual capital. The findings also indicates that the measurement for intellectual capital varies based on the measurement process, time period, firms, industries and country to country perspectives. It can be also observed that firms have the tendency not to disclose the intellectual capital information. Conclusions – This study recommends that intellectual capital should be presented in a fixed format and human, relational and structural capital should be included as intellectual capital. Additionally, it suggests that mandatory requirement of legislation, effective corporate governance mechanism and stock exchange listing requirement might increase the quality of intellectual reporting.

Shareholders solely depend on annual reports to make investment, credit and other decisions. Investors expect that information should be reliable, relevant, comparable, consistent and thus easy to use for decision making. But whether the importance of annual reports to all shareholders is equally significant is a question of research. Thus, this research study tries to find out the importance of reading annual reports to the investors. A questionnaire survey is conducted on investors considering thirty one general shareholders and six brokers. This research based survey finds that most of the shareholders have no knowledge about accounting or finance and they have little knowledge about capital markets due to lack of training. This study also finds that general shareholders read an annual report at least moderately except value added statement, chairman’s review, director’s report and rumor. This study recommends human resource should be developed through adequate training, and annual reports should provide transparent and quality information which will ultimately increase the confidence of investors.