The Practice of Policy about Corporate Environmental Information Disclosure in China——Data From A-Share Listed Companies of Heavy Polluting Industries

Abstract

Corporate environmental disclosure policy is a system tool to solve the environmental information asymmetry problem, it has an extremely important significance to improve public participation in environmental activities, and promote the improvement of corporate environmental performance. However, there is less literature about the direct corporate environmental information disclosure policy, and these studies are mostly qualitative or small sample studies, reliability is low. In this paper, all the listed companies of A shares heavily polluting industries are studied as a large sample to research the health of corporate environmental information disclosure system, in order to find out that the system operation runs low performance, the quality of environmental information disclosure is not good enough, revealing the main reason lies in the system is unreasonable design, the poor independence of the regulatory authorities, and then, put forward some specific proposals.

Objective: To investigate the practice of corporate environmental information disclosure policy, reveal its cause.

Results: around seventy percent of heavily polluting industries listed companies have disclosed environmental information; the disclosure of the information mostly described in text or data; majority of environmental information disclosed in the Report of the Board of Directors or Accounting Statements; the disclosure of the mainly contents of environmental management and environmental governance; large gap between inter-industry enterprises  in the quality and quantity of environmental information disclosure.

Research limitations and significance of research: This article examines only the data of corporate environmental disclosure policy operation of 2010, is a cross-sectional study. Follow-up longitudinal studies should be carried out to study the changes in corporate environmental disclosure before and after the implementation of the policy, empirical test whether the policy has a substantial impact on corporate environmental disclosure.

Practical significance: this article summarizes the problems of corporate environmental disclosure, reveals its cause, and puts forward a reasonable proposal, which has an important reference value for government decision-making.

Innovation and value: select all the listed companies of heavily polluting industries of 2010 as study sample firstly, to reflect the most important aspects of corporate environmental information disclosure policy runs.