Social responsibility reporting in Singapore

• Main Authors: Lim, Gillian Bee Ling, Lee, Chin Nee, Koh, Mui Tee
• Other Authors: Zubaidah Ismail
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2015
• Subjects: DRNTU::Business::Accounting::Social accounting
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/63938
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The issue of corporate social reporting involves many activities that result in externalities. The existence of these external economies or external diseconomies results from activities which affect parties to business enterprises but are not captured by the standard financial statements of the business enterprise. However, to date, an appropriate measurement system has not yet been agreed upon. Thus, the current state of social reporting by corporations remains principally voluntary. The objective of this study is to investigate the types, that is, the four areas of , social disclosure: human resource, products and services, community involvement and physical environment; and the extent of social disclosure found in the annual reports of public listed companies. The study also investigates the relationships between corporate characteristics and social disclosure. The corporate characteristics examined are size, profitability and industrial background. The study found that the two most popular types of disclosure were human resource and products and services and the most common form of quantitative disclosure was the value added statement. Four statistical tests were conducted to examine the relationship between corporate characteristics and social disclosure. The study concluded that the size in terms of total assets and turnover of the corporation may not be correlated to the amount of social disclosure; test of the correlation between profitability and the amount of social disclosure also showed no correlation. However, the chi-square test provided evidence that social disclosure may be dependent upon the type of industry in which the firm operates m.