Environmental Disclosure of Malaysian Companies and Its Association withCorporate Characteristics

Abstract

Corporate responsibility in sustaining environmental development began to attract the attention of various organizations in the early 1990s. The main objective of this study is to analyze the annual report of companies in Malaysia (N=100) in order to establish the current trend of environmental reporting and the level of environmental information disclosure of companies. Data was analyzed using qualitative analysis software to detect terms/areas related to environmental reporting. The evaluation techniques used in this study were adopted from research instruments used by The
Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (2002) and Spada Research, United Kingdom (2008). Further analysis was carried out using SPSS to run regression analysis to find out the correlations of environmental disclosure items with the respective independent variables. The findings of the study indicated that environmental reporting through corporate reports in Malaysia was at the infancy stage. Also, environmental disclosure was significantly dependent on size, nature of industry and listing status of organizations.