Thi Xuan Hong Nguyen

This research evaluates the differences in financial performance of enterprises before and after privatization aiming to find out the influence of privatization on the enterprises’ performance. The study is based on the audited financial statements of 105 Vietnamese privatized enterprises privatized in the period from 2005 to 2016. Applying the Wilcoxon signed-rank test, the obtained results prove that after privatization profitability and outputs of investigated firms are significantly higher than prior privatization. However, there is no significant change of leverage. Applying a regression model to evaluate the factors affecting financial performance of firms in the research model, it was found out that the proportion of state ownership, economic growth, operating period, enterprise`s size, and business risk have positive influence on the financial performance of research firms. However, the leverage of these firms has a negative impact on the financial performance. In accordance with the obtained results, this study suggests that the privatization process should be continued regardless of firm size or business type. The government should create fair competition environment, remove incentives and supports for State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs), manage changes in privatized firms, and enforce the legal system.

The study is conducted to investigate the impact of corporate governance and ownership on business performance in listed firms on the Vietnamese Stock Exchange. The study employed the general regression method (GLS) with a sample of 506 listed firms in the period 2008–2020. The study demonstrated the impacts of corporate governance and ownership on firm performance. First, the size of the Board of Directors (BOD), state ownership, and foreign ownership have a positive impact on firm performance. On the contrary, the ratio of independent members in the BOD and the percentage of members of the BOD who are major shareholders have a negative impact on firm performance. An interesting finding is that the BOD with female members, the duality of director and chairman, and the ratio of independent members have a negative impact on the Board of Management. In contrast, firms with no female members in the BOD have a positive relationship with firm performance. The empirical results and recommendations in this study might be good instructions for firms to improve their firm performance.