Economic Value Added (EVA) - Literature Review and Relevant Issues

This paper aims to present a narrative literature review of 112 papers published on the EVA from 1994 to 2008. It provides a classification scheme, identifies the gaps in existing literature and suggests the direction for future research. Studies are classified and presented on the basis of the time period, issues covered, distribution of literature in various sources, methodology used, country-wise publications and contributions made by the researchers on the concept. The studies conducted in the developed countries have largely been found to be supporting EVA though there are certain studies in these countries too that consider conventional measures as better tools of corporate performance reporting. However, in developing economies less numbers of studies are available supporting the empirical validity of the concept as a corporate performance measurement tool. The concept of EVA has gained significant attention in the advanced economies, but implementation issues and its validity is under debate all over the world. The paper presents a comprehensive literature review and a critical analysis to move towards the advances in EVA. It may be a very useful source of information to the researchers and managers who wish to understand and implement EVA and carry out further research on the diverse issues of this interesting and value adding performance metric.