DOI: 10.5176/2251-1997_AF15.74
Authors: Abdul Razeed
Abstract:
Environmental issues have emerged as a prominent social issue of the 1990’s and in the beginning of the 21st Century. In more recent times, electronic dissemination of information online is also becoming commonplace for larger as well as smaller corporations Drawing on a sample of resource companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange, this study analyses the VED behaviour of these companies over a twelve year period. The voluntary environmental disclosure (VED) behaviour in two groups of media (namely, hard copy reports and on the Internet) was surveyed in the year by another investigation 3 years after a crisis. For the paper – ‘crisis’ refers to two major financial downturns, the Dotcom crisis in early 2000, and the Global Financial crisis (GFC) in 2007-09. Analyses are undertaken before and after those two crises to determine possible reasons driving the VED disclosure over the 12 year period.
The results of this study indicate that US resource companies favour the Internet over hard copy annual and sustainability reports for dissemination of environmental information. Regression analysis was then undertaken with dependent variable of overall levels of VED in the various fiscal years. Size is a significant predictor of the overall levels of VED in 2000 and very significant predictor at the in 2008. Economic Performance is also a significant predictor in 2008. It is interesting that in 2004 and 2012, there are no significant predictors for the levels of VED disclosed indicating that there may be other factors in play when it comes to understanding why US resource companies disclosed VED in these two years. It is also noteworthy that size is a significant predictor in both 2000 and 2008 where there were different types of crisis, namely the dot.com bubble and the Global Financial Crisis. However the conservative levels of disclosures of VED information overall is still puzzling. The political visibility of organizations and factors that go beyond stakeholder theory such as the technological know- how of the management may possible reasons for the observed VED levels. This study throws more light into the motivations of US companies in choosing hard copy reports and/or the Internet for disclosure of environmental information.
Keywords: Hard Copy, Internet, EnvironmentKeywords-component; formatting; style; styling; insert (key words)
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