The impact of corporate related factors on environmental disclosure practices of Philippine listed service and industrial companies from 2013 - 2015

• Main Authors: Blanco, Maria Beatriz G., Calapatia, Chastine Grace A., De Castro, Maricar Ivy R., Espiritu, Aina Jenelle T.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2016
• Subjects: Corporations > Environmental aspects > Philippines
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_bachelors/7168
• Institution: De La Salle University

The Philippines, like the rest of the world, currently face numerous environmental concerns. A survey by the Pew Research Center in July 2015 revealed that 72% of Filipinos are said to be very concerned about climate change (as cited in Ranada, 2015). The heightened sense of responsibility towards the environment has pressured companies to engage in green activities and to recognize its effect on the environment in order to satisfy stakeholders. This study intends to find the effect of corporate related factors on environmental disclosure practices of publicly listed service and industrial companies in the Philippines. This study was conducted with a sample of seventy-five (75) companies from the industrial and service sectors obtained through the Philippine Stock Exchange Edge website. The corporate related factors such as the corporate size (total assets, revenues and number of employees), profitability (return on equity, return on assets and earnings per share), financial leverage (debt to equity ratio), industry type, foreign operations, legal ownership and corporate age were obtained from the annual reports of the companies. After obtaining such data, the level of environmental disclosure of the chosen companies were evaluated using the 20-item Checklist of Environmental Disclosure developed by Omnamasivaya and Prasad (2016). The obtained Environmental Accounting Disclosure Index (EADI) score from the said checklist, was used as the dependent variable in the multiple regression analysis performed with the corporate related factors as the independent variables. This research found a significant positive relationship between the companies total assets, return on assets, number of employees, industry type and their level of environmental disclosure. It signifies that these listed factors positively influence the level of environmental disclosure a company publishes to its stakeholders. This study has implications on the management of the studied companies and their stakeholders. For the management of the companies involved, pressure from stakeholders to coordinate the transparency of their environment-related actions with their environmental compliance arises. This is in accordance with the legitimacy theory. With the additional knowledge available to the shareholders, they would have the power to make more informed decisions when investing in companies with a particular level of environmental disclosure, which is one way of knowing whether these companies actually act to preserve the environment. Lastly, this study adds to the limited existing literature that studied Philippines service and industrial companies level of environmental disclosure.