Motives Of Corporate Environmental Disclosure

As economics develops rapidly nowadays, people are paying more attention to their living environment in addition to the wealth and convenience that economics brought to us. Enterprises hold the primary responsibility for pollution, thus they are willing to disclose more environmental information to demonstrate the legitimacy. Awareness of environmental protection has been greatly improved since the Rio Declaration in 1992. With regard to our domestic enterprises, it is another story. Corporate environmental disclosure (CED) derived from the 1990s in China; however, it developed slowly all these years. There are few companies publicize the environmental reports, meanwhile, we can see little environmental information in corporate annual reports. Consequently, it is essential to study the incentives and disincentives which impact CED.In this paper we first study the basic theories of CED motivations from previous literatures. Political Economy Theory, Legitimacy Theory and Stakeholder Theory can be used to explain why companies will disclose their environmental information. Drawing on the methods and conclusions of previous research, we separate our study objects into two parts, naming information supplier and information user. When design the questionnaire, we divide the CED motives into incentives and disincentives, in order to do in-depth research from both positive and negative aspects. Based on the above views, the paper expects to achieve the following objectives through collecting pre-primary survey data and doing statistical analysis:1. Research on the incentives of CED;2. Research on the disincentives of CED3. Compare the awareness of CED between information supplier and information user. The concrete structure of the paper is as follows:The first chapter is the introduction. It tells mainly the background and significance of the paper and shows the basic framework and innovation. The second chapter is the theoretical beginning and basis of the paper. It summarizes the main theoretical and empirical literature of CED motives, which provide the referent range of the design of the questionnaire. The third, fourth, fifth chapters are the main part of the paper. The third chapter proposes assumptions of this paper after the literature summary. The forth chapter tells the selection of data and recovery of questionnaires. The fifth chapter is empirical analysis. It uses principal component analysis, reliability test, one- sample T test and variance analysis to get to the intentions of this paper. After the component analysis, the questions of each aspect were divided into three parts. The motives of willing to disclose environmental information consist of markets incentive, external pressure incentive and accountability incentive. While the motives of reluctant to disclose environmental information comprise environmental protection awareness incentive, management pressure incentive and self-protection incentive. The sixth chapter is the conclusions and suggestions. This paper summarizes the main conclusions through the above analysis and points out the shortcomings and the suggestions for the future study.The study of this survey which is from the 75 suppliers and 163 users show that:1. With regard to the topic of CED incentives, accountability incentive reached the highest score. Significant test indicated that it was considered more important than other incentives. So we can conclude that the reason why suppliers consider CED is out of moral considerations, so as to fulfill its corporate social responsibility performance. However, information users consider CED as a chance to establish a good image so as to build brand and promote products. 2. With regard to the topic of CED disincentives, self-protection disincentive received a much higher mean average score for the supplier group. Significant test indicated that it was considered more important than other disincentives. However, users consider the environmental protection awareness disincentive was more important than others, and it has passed the significant test. As a result, the reason why companies are reluctant to release environmental information from the suppliers'view is to avoid disclose information to competitors, while users considered this problem as a lack of information demand.3. There is significant difference of CED motives between the two groups, which may be the factor that block CED.The main innovation in the paper is as follows:1. Incentives and disincentives of CED are hard to reflect in financial reports or other public information. Therefore, this article used questionnaires to collect raw data in order to achieve the purposes mentioned above, while previous studies were concentrating on secondary data approach.2. Up till now most references studied the CED motivations from positive aspect. There were few articles talked about this problem from the negative aspect. This paper is aiming to study CED motives from both positive and negative sides, wishing to complement the shortage of previous study.