Corporate Governance in Romania between Compliance and Performance: Landmarks of the new BVB Corporate Governance Code 2025

Abstract

This paper compares the previous Bucharest Stock Exchange Corporate Governance Code issued in 2015 with the revised code effective from 1 January 2025 and reinterprets the key moments of change in the broader period 2001– 2025. The study combines documentary comparison of official BVB texts with a literature review grounded in recent Romanian and international academic articles on compliance, board structure, investor relations, sustainability, and corporate governance performance. The results show that the 2025 Code does not merely refine the earlier logic of comply-or-explain, but expands it towards board effectiveness, annual monitoring, sustainability governance, stakeholder oversight and more explicit expectations concerning risk management and corporate reporting. The paper also proposes a synthetic indicator of amendment intensity in order to visualize the relative amplitude of the revisions adopted in 2008, 2015 and 2025. CZU: 005.35:336.76(498); JEL: G34, G38, K22, M14