Is Corporate Governance Performance in Public Enterprises an Underexplored Research Domain? A Bibliometric Analysis

Impelled by economic and social needs, corporate governance has become an increasingly common concept in the contemporary era. Consequently, its impact on performance is receiving greater attention from scholars. However, due to the relative novelty of this concept, there are also certain shortcomings in its scope of study. Furthermore, in the context of public sector, corporate governance is currently a new subject and the literature is still emerging. Current research in the field has not yet extensively explored the performance of corporate governance in public enterprises. For this reason, the main objective of this paper is to highlight precisely these gaps between the study of the phenomenon in the public context and its study in the general context. A comparative bibliometric approach was conducted using two data sets extracted from the Web of Science Core Collection database. The data were subjected to several analyses for answering the general research question, namely: Is the corporate governance performance of public enterprises a topic overlooked by the literature? Hence, the final results present the size of the two data sets from several perspectives, like the network map, frequency by year, frequency of certain items in order to compare the interest given to the two categories, thereby ultimately highlighting novelty or even the lack of high interest in what concerns the public sector. The paper allows for a much easier identification of limitations in this research field, thereby filling a literature gap and making a significant contribution to the literature of corporate governance.