Empirical Research On The Influencing Factors Of Environmental Disclosure Of The Listed Companies In Coal Industry

The coal industry is a pillar industry in the national economy, and the environmental information disclosure of listed companies in the industry would affect not only the development of the industry, but also the development of the whole society. In this article, the author framed environmental information disclosure content which was suitable for the coal industry, and analyzed the current situation and problems of environmental information disclosure in the coal industry using content analysis and grading evaluation method. Then, the author pointed out factors which influenced environmental information disclosure of the coal industry. The factors were divided into internal factors and external factors. The internal factors mainly contained enterprise size, profitability, debt level, actual controller and the proportion of independent directors, and the external factors consisted of government's macroeconomic policy efforts and regional economic development. The actual impacts of these factors were tested by empirical analysis. According to the empirical results, the author put forward the corresponding countermeasures.The article selected 26 listed companies in the coal industry between 2007 and 2009 as the research object, and chose environmental information disclosure index as the dependent variable, seven factors as explanatory variables, to construct multiple regression model using SPSS software. What's more, the author used the software for descriptive statistical analysis and some kinds of test between variables, and determined the influencing factors and the actual impact using stepwise regression method. The conclusions were as follows. Firstly, the overall level of environmental disclosure in the coal industry from 2007 to 2009 was low, and there were some problems in environmental disclosure, such as the willingness to disclose environmental information was not strong, the usefulness of disclosed environmental information was not enough, and the environmental disclosure modes chosen by companies were not fixed. Secondly, enterprise size, profitability and government's macroeconomic policy efforts were obviously positive correlated with the environmental disclosure index, debt level was negatively correlated with the index, actual controller and environmental disclosure level existed obvious relation, and the proportion of the independent directors and regional economic development had no significant correlation with environmental information disclosure level. According to the above, the author made suggestions for improving the level of the environmental information disclosure of the coal industry by the way of internal improvement and external supervision. In the way of internal improvement, coal enterprises should regulate the boards of director of listed coal companies, and improve the mechanism of internal environmental governance. On the other hand, the government should strengthen the political guidance which is related to environmental disclosure and make efforts to create industry environmental information disclosure system.