Corporate Governance, ESG Disclosure and Firm Value in an Emerging Market

Purpose: This paper examines how corporate governance and the disclosure of environmental, social and governance (ESG) information have co-evolved in Vietnam between 2015 and 2024, and through which channels the two are expected to bear on firm value in an emerging market where the state remains a dominant owner.

Design/methodology/approach: The study adopts a qualitative design that combines systematic document analysis of 18 regulatory and soft-law instruments issued between 2012 and 2024 with an integrative review of published empirical evidence on Vietnamese listed companies and secondary benchmark data from the ASEAN Corporate Governance Scorecard and a ten-year census of disclosure practices. Material was coded deductively against agency, stakeholder, legitimacy, signalling and institutional theory, and inductively for emergent themes.

Findings: Vietnam’s regime moved through three phases: Mandated entry (2015 to 2017), soft-law consolidation (2017 to 2020) and statutory upgrading with climate alignment (2021 to 2024). Disclosure spread rapidly in breadth, yet depth lagged. Standalone reports rose only from about 1 percent to 7 percent of listed firms, GRI referencing stayed near 22 percent throughout the decade, and third-party assurance remained rare. Vietnam’s mean governance score in the 2024 regional assessment (60.15 points) sat 31 points below the ASEAN mean. The empirical literature reports a mostly positive association between disclosure and value, but the evidence is concentrated among large firms and is sensitive to how disclosure is measured. We argue that governance shapes value less through the volume of ESG disclosure than through its credibility, and we formalise this argument in a conceptual framework with five propositions.

Originality/value: The paper offers the first decade-long, regulation-anchored synthesis of the governance, disclosure and value nexus in Vietnam. It distinguishes formal adoption from substantive practice and proposes a credibility-centred mechanism that can be tested once longitudinal, assurance-adjusted disclosure data become available.