Environmental disclosure content-quality in various reporting media: an empirical study of oil and gas companies in developing countries.

With the increasing global concern for the environment, environmental disclosure occupies a significant place within the firm's disclosure strategy. The majority of prior environmental disclosure studies have focused on the quantity of disclosure in the annual reports but less attention has been given on the quality of disclosure. Most of the studies that focused on the quality of environmental disclosure have found low level of quality of such disclosure. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the
content-quality of environmental disclosure in different reporting mediums by oil and gas companies in developing countries. The study also identified factors that could influence the content-quality of environmental disclosure. Using content analysis, an index and scoring system on the basis of the dimensions of evidence (monetary/quantitative, non-quantitative) and specificity (specific, general) were applied to the annual reports, stand-alone reports and corporate homepages of a
sample of 116 oil and gas companies in 19 developing counties. The results of this
study reveal that the content-quality of the environmental disclosure of the sample companies is relatively high. The results also indicate great variations in the disclosure content-quality in different reporting media. The stand-alone reports have greater content-quality than annual reports and corporate homepages in
communicating environmental information. Moreover, the results of this study reveal
that out of twelve hypothesised variables, only five variables (company size, foreign ownership, profitability, leverage and membership of industry's associations) are positively related to the environmental disclosure content-quality. The study has implications in enhancing the understanding of environmental disclosure practices of oil and gas companies in developing countries and factors that influence the contentquality of such disclosure. Additionally, the study has provided an insight into the
differences between disclosures in different reporting mediums, which in turn will facilitate the selection of reporting medium/s of environmental information that can be relied upon.