The environmental disclosures by the Malaysian Public Listed companies :a longitudinal study of the property sector

Abstract

Based on legitimacy theory, the main objective of this study is to examine the changes of the volume, type, quality and nature (hard and soft) of the environmental disclosures as reported by the Property Sector companies in their annual reports, websites, online newsletters and news archives for the years 2004, 2005 and 2006 and to investigate whether two political cost (political visibility) firm characteristics can be associated with these disclosures. Content analysis disclosure index and an interrogation instrument were used for the coding and measurement of the data from the top thirty Property Developers ranked in The Edge Malaysia during 2006. To examine the changes of environmental disclosures and their associations with firm characteristics, Friedman Test, Wilcoxon signed rank test and Spearman’s rho were employed in the current study. The results generally indicate a low volume and mainly declarative environmental disclosures, poor quality and mainly soft environmental information reported by the sample companies. These disclosures are higher for 2004 and 2006 and lower for 2005. It is argued that the higher disclosures for 2004 and 2006 together with the mainly soft and declarative environmental disclosures observed reflect a legitimacy motive. Furthermore, these environmental disclosures appear to be not associated with the two political visibility measures examined. The small number of companies selected the use of non parametric measures and the reliability and validity issues inherent in content analysis method may limit the significance of the results reported in this study.