Purpose -This study aims to identify factors that influence corporate environmental disclosure (CED) quality. Design/methodology/approach -Using content analysis, an index and scoring scheme were applied to annual reports, stand-alone reports and corporate homepages of a sample of 116 oil and gas companies in 19 developing countries (DCs).Findings -The results of this study reveal that out of 12 hypothesized variables, only 5 variables (company size, foreign ownership, profitability, leverage and membership of industry's associations) are positively related to the CED quality.Practical implications -The study has implications in enhancing the understanding of CED practices by oil and gas companies in DCs and the factors that influence the quality of such disclosure. Thus, the results of the study serve as input toward the development of improved regulations concerning CED for the oil and gas industry and provide guidelines to the regulators to make relevant decisions on social and environmental information items to be incorporated in the regulatory standards.Originality/value -The current study attempts to fill the gaps in the literature by examining CED quality (rather than its quantity), concentrating on environmental disclosure made on the three main mediums of reporting. The study also extends previous research of CED by investigating some factors that have the potential to influence the content-quality of environmental disclosure, such as type of company (independent or constrain company) and industry's association membership which have never been examined in the related literature.

Corporate environmental reporting (CER) plays important role due to the increase in public awareness of environmental issues. Hence, to be beneficial, corporate managers should not merely display CER information but rather emphasize on the quality of information disclosed. The quality of CER can be seen as a key value for companies and many benefits could be provided if companies released high quality environmental information. Prior environmental disclosure literature has not focused much on disclosure quality; instead, it concentrated on the quantity of disclosure. In addition, most of the few studies that focused on quality of environmental disclosure have revealed low level of quality of such disclosure. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the quality of environmental disclosure in different reporting mediums by oil and gas companies in developing countries. Using content analysis, an index and scoring scheme were applied to the annual reports, stand-alone reports and corporate homepages of a sample of 116 oil and gas companies in 19 developing countries. The results of this study reveal that the quality of the environmental disclosure of the sample companies is relatively high compared to previous studies. This study has important implications in enhancing the understanding of environmental disclosure practices of oil and gas companies in developing countries.