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The electricity generation industry has been under close regulatory and public scrutiny for decades for the significant impacts its activities have on the environment. The industry is responsible for a large proportion of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, which has intensified public and regulatory scrutiny of late. Therefore, electricity generation firms face immense pressure to show environmental responsibility. Firms respond with environmental disclosures in their annual reports, in stand-alone-reports, and on websites. In this study, we use comprehensive disclosure indices to measure the quality (or comprehensiveness) of the CO2 emissions related disclosure and the overall environmental disclosure of 205 electricity generation firms in 35 countries. We find that firms in countries with a high commitment towards the environment and a carbon emissions trading scheme (measures of social concern for environmental protection and emissions), are likely to disclose more comprehensive environmental information. In addition, we find that firm size, age of the assets, listing status, and media exposure influence disclosure. Environmental performance, measured by CO2 emissions, is not significantly related to environmental disclosure among our sample firms. The theoretical implication of these findings is that social beliefs (that is different in different countries) prompt a legitimating disclosure response from firms that is not significantly affected by their performance against that social belief. Our results address one of the major social concerns of our time, i.e., GHG emissions and firm disclosure responses, and therefore the results will be of interest to regulators, managers, accountants, environmental groups, and researchers.

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A content analysis of the annual reports of 96 Malaysian companies in 1999, 2003 and 2006 finds that the number of companies reporting on the environment increased from 47 percent in 1999 to 60 percent in 2003, and further increased to 67 percent in 2006. However, the extent of environmental reporting as measured by the number of environmental sentences and disclosure scores (using a self-constructed disclosure index) indicates a low quality of disclosure. Overall, the disclosure is ad-hoc and predisposed towards building a “good corporate citizen” image. The increasing trend, however, is consistent with the prediction of social issue life cycle theory.

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