Social Press,Corporate Governance And Environmental Information Disclosure

Large scale haze weather protracted in2013raised our deep concerns about the environment again, and also set off alarm bells for urgent pollution. We have made great achievements and attracted worldwide attention because of the past30years’ reform and opening-up policy. But the environmental costs of China’s economic growth are also very expensive. Haze problem just highlights the problem of environmental pollution in the tip of the iceberg, contaminated soil and water have also reached the point of comprehensive governance. Environmental pollution has become an obstacle to the sustainable economic development.Enterprise is the direct creators of social wealth, but also the major producers of environmental pollution. Companies in creating social wealth can effectively control pollution of the environment and maximize economic and environmental benefits at the same time is the key whether the whole economy could be developed continuously. A series of environmental pollution and ecological imbalance occur in the current time, such as:Zijin Mining Group’s Keto Acid Water Leakage Accident, Oil Spills Accident in the Bohai Sea and Algae Crisis in Tai Lake, make the public’s will of requiring companies to provide environmental information increasing highly. The environmental performance of the enterprise and the fulfillment of social responsibility help them make evaluations and decisions.For enterprises, the disclosure of environmental information is a major platform to begin dialogue with the public. It is also a necessary criteria for surviving and developing in the resource-saving and environment-friendly community. Full disclosure of information on the environment is a prerequisite for environmental governance to build a more open, transparent and democratic and harmonious society. But the level of listed companies’environmental information disclosure is still very low and the environment reporting statement become formalistic. The main reason of this situation is lacking standards of corporate environmental information disclosure and the internal and external constraint mechanism. Therefore, to study and analysis the quality of environmental information disclosure and its constraint mechanism is of great practical significance.Based on this, through reading relevant literature on environmental information disclosure, and collating and summarizing them, on the basis of legitimacy theory public pressure theory and asymmetric information theory, I analyze the external pressure enterprise faces and make two assumptions:one is the greater the social pressures faced by one company, the more likely to choose to disclose environmental information, and second, the higher the level of corporate governance, the higher the level of environmental disclosure. This paper selects chemicals, paper and other heavy polluting industries of148listed companies as samples to verify the hypothesis that put forward. We find that the pressure of public opinion, political and credit on the external constraint mechanism have significant positive correlation with the level of environmental information disclosure. In addition, the listed companies have the motion to protect their reputations, the higher the reputation is, the better it disclosure. In addition, the scale of the supervisory board, the degree of the board’s activities, the board of directors’shareholding proportion and managerial compensation of internal constraint mechanism also have significant positive correlation with the level of environmental information disclosure. Combined title of board chair and CEO is not conducive to enhance the level of environmental information disclosure.Combine empirical results and the current status of environmental information disclosure, this paper presents the following reasonable recommendations to Environmental Information Disclosure Guidelines and superintendent office. First, relevant departments should develop corporate environmental accounting standards and establish its calculating system; Second, we need improve business performance evaluation system and introduce environmental performance evaluation; Third, we should set the award of corporate environmental information disclosure to promote the construction of environmental protection incentive mechanism; Fourth, regulating media environment to make full use of benign social supervisory role of the network; Fifth, improving the corporate governance structure to establish and improve internal oversight mechanisms, including the independent director system and the board of supervisors. And setting Environmental Audit Committee to give full play to the internal restraint mechanism.This paper consists of six parts:The first part is the introduction, this part mainly describe the research background, significance, research ideas and methods as well as the major innovations.The second part is the literature review, it gives a comprehensive review of domestic and foreign relevant research in the perspective of social pressure and corporate governance’s relevant contend with environmental information disclosure. It reviews existing research results, points out deficiencies and puts forward the research directions of this article.The third part is an overview of environmental information disclosure and its theoretical basics.In this section, it first expounds three concepts, concluding corporate environmental responsibility, environmental accounting system and the environmental information disclosure. Then elaborating environmental accounting information disclosure theory ini the perspective of social pressure and corporate governance. It contains Legitimacy theory, Public Pressure theory, the Principle Agent theory and the Information Asymmetric theory. This paves the way to the hypotheses proposed next.The fourth part is empirical research design, it introduces the research hypotheses, the selection of indexes and sample as well as the choosing model’s data sources.The fifth part is the empirical analysis. Firstly, it mainly using the method of multiple regression to approach empirical social pressures concluding public pressure, political pressure, credit pressure and corporate governance factors that affect the level of listed companies’ environmental accounting information disclosure in China. Secondly, using logistic regression methods to test the regression results. At last, we analyze and explain the results. The sixth part is the conclusions and recommendations. It draws a conclusion according to the regression results of the fifth part and analyzes the results. Combining with the status of the current environmental information disclosure and the empirical analysis results, this paper makes several policy recommendations.