Environmental Regulation,Internal Control And The Quality Of Enterprise Environmental Information Disclosure

In recent years,the rapid development of China’s economy has caused a series of serious environmental pollution problems,such as water pollution,air pollution,industrial waste pollution,etc.,which has caused great damage to the ecological environment,but also seriously affected people’s health and daily life.At present,our government and the people attach great importance to the issue of sustainable development,and enterprises,especially industrial enterprises,as the main undertakers of environmental problems,should bear the corresponding responsibility of environmental protection and contribute to the realization of sustainable development.Environmental information disclosure is one of the main ways for enterprises to provide report users with their social responsibilities such as environmental protection,which plays a vital role in the process of ecological environmental protection and social and economic development.But at present,although the government has issued a series of environmental protection policies and the public awareness of environmental protection is rising,the construction of enterprise information disclosure system is still not perfect,and the quality level of accounting information disclosure of some enterprises is still low.Under the information asymmetry,the external personnel of enterprises can not understand the real situation of enterprises in time,which leads to wrong decisions.Therefore,it is of great significance to strengthen the research on the quality of environmental information disclosure of Chinese enterprises,especially industrial enterprises.This paper starts from the influencing factors of the quality of corporate environmental information disclosure,takes the listed companies of A-share industrial enterprises in Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchange from 2009 to 2018 as samples,and uses the evaluation results of Rankins CSR Ratings(RKS),an authoritative third-party rating agency of China’s corporate social responsibility,to express the level of environmental information disclosure of listed companies.The government environmental regulation is divided into order control type,market incentive type and public participation type.Combined with the data of local pollution control investment,sewage charges and environmental petition number,the paper empirically tests the impact of different types of environmental regulation tools on the quality of enterprise environmental information disclosure.Using the internal control index and the research method of intermediary effect,this paper tests the intermediary role of internal control in the relationship between environmental regulation and environmental information disclosure quality.The results show that:(1)there is a significant positive correlation between order control,market incentive and public participation environmental regulation and the quality of enterprise environmental information disclosure,that is,environmental regulation can promote the quality of enterprise environmental information disclosure;(2)The order control type,market incentive type and public participation type of environmental regulation are significantly positively correlated with the internal control of enterprises,that is,environmental regulation can promote enterprises to improve and perfect their internal control system;(3)Internal control has a partial intermediary effect in the relationship between environmental regulation and enterprise environmental accounting information disclosure,that is,environmental regulation can promote the quality of environmental information disclosure by influencing internal control.Finally,based on the above research results,combined with the particularity of China’s institutional environment,this paper puts forward corresponding policy suggestions for the government and enterprises: First of all,the government should strengthen the construction of different types of environmental regulation tools,and take different measures to improve the system for different environmental regulation tools;secondly,enterprises should improve their awareness of environmental protection,strengthen the improvement of the internal control system of environmental management,and create a good control environment for enterprises’ environmental information disclosure behavior.