English Abstract
Abstract:
The main objective of the current study is to examine the relationship between the ownership structure and the audit quality in the GCC. The developing countries' corporate governance systems are witnessing weaknesses, which causes imbalanced relationship between external and internal mechanisms of their governance systems. With the existence of ownership concentration issue in the GCC countries, where the rights and values of minority shareholders might be expropriated, the audit quality association with ownership structure was examined to investigate the impact of each type of shareholders in the GCC on the audit quality. For this purpose, a sample was selected from the six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Bahrain, KSA, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and UAE), which includes all companies listed in the industrial sector, whereby all financial sector listed firms were excluded. The relationship of the current study was examined through three main statistical tests, these are discriptive statistics, Pearson correlation coefficient statistics, and the Multivariate analyses. The findings of the Multivariate analyses for model 1 show that only three independent variables have a significant positive association with the audit quality (family, government and foreign ownerships), while model 2 results reveal that only two independent variables were positively associated with the quality of auditing (financial institutional and government ownerships). The study indicates a need for future research through some recommendations. It recommends to focus on financial sector's listed firms as they are excluded in this study. It also recommends extending the period of the examination for more than six years to get more improved results. Besides, it is suggested for future research to consider other types of ownerships, and other measurements of audit quality for comparison purposes.
