Government Supervision, Corporate Governance And Environmental Disclosure

Each participant of economic activity has inescapable responsibility in protecting the environment. In recent years, environmental pollution events occur frequently, such as the cadmium pollution incident of Guangxi Longjiang River, "three wastes" pollution event of Harbin Pharmaceutical Factory, groundwater pollution incident of Weifang of Shandong province. Especially, in the beginning of 2013, grave foggy weather appear in most areas of our country. The air pollution indexs of Beijing, Tianjin, Zhengzhou and Nantong have reached the maximum, which makes the environmental issues become the focus of attention again. The production and operation activities of companies would result in environmental pollution, and this is the main reason of environmental issues. So companies are supposed to be the important power of protecting environment. Corporate environmental disclosure which connect protecting environment and companies activities become an important medium for the communication between corporate environmental performance and the outside world. The public can know whether companies take on the responsibility in protecting environment through environmental disclosure. The Ministry of Environmental Protection and Shanghai Stock Exchange have issued a series of laws and regulations on environmental disclosure since 2008, which increasing the pressure on government regulation about environmental disclosure for companies. Based on the backgrounds, this study research on the relationship of government supervision, corporate governance and corporate environmental disclosure. The level of environmental disclosure of different company is different, and there are many factors that affect the level of environmental disclosure. The government supervision is one important aspect of public pressures on enterprises. Whether government supervision would affect the level of environmental disclosure? What role does corporate governance would play in this process? This paper investigates how the government supervision and the corporate governance affect the level of corporate environmental disclosure.Drawing upon legitimacy theory, principal-agent theory and asymmetric information theory, this paper analyses the possible relationship of government supervision, corporate governance and the level of corporate environmental disclosure, then propose hypothesis. After that, this study examines the relationship between government supervision, corporate governance and the level of corporate environmental disclosure empirically using liner multi-regression. The result of this paper are:(1) The local government supervision on environmental disclosure can significantly improve the level of environmental disclosure; (2) The ownership concentration and the scale of the board of directors of corporate governance would promote the role of the government regulatory.