Within the 2030 Agenda, the United Nations have explicitly required that the Member States introduce within their jurisdictions new forms of regulations about non‐financial reporting practices. The aim of this paper is to investigate the effects related to the transposition of Directive 2014/95/EU by analyzing firm‐level, governance‐level, and report‐level determinants of business reporting on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). To conduct such an analysis, this study defines and introduces the SDG Reporting Score (SRS)—a qualitative proxy representing a firm orientation toward SDG reporting. The study sample includes the non‐financial reports of 153 Italian Public Interest Entities. The results show a positive relationship between a firm's SRS and various determinants, such as the presence of independent directors on the board, expertise with non‐financial reporting, and length of the report. Finally, the highest levels of SRS are achieved by firms operating in environmental sensitive sectors.

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According to Directive 2014/95/EU on disclosure of non-financial information from 2017 onwards, large companies (exceeding 500 employees) headquartered in Member States will be required to provide a series of social, environmental, and governance statements. The Directive was transposed into Italian law by Legislative Decree 254 of 30 December 2016.The aim of this paper is to evaluate the information gap for Italian companies and, consequently, the adjustments required by the new Directive on non-financial information. In order to analyze the level of non-financial and diversity disclosure, we created an assessment model called "Non-financial information score", which records the required information as a percentage. We apply it to a sample of 223 large companies. The results (with an average NFI score of about 49%) show that, in spite of what has previously emerged in the European debate about the application of the Directive on the part of large companies, an information gap remains, although the implementation of the directive should help to fill it in the coming years. In this sense, the potential contribution of the EU directive to non-financial disclosure in Italy appears to be greater than we had expected. Thus, in accordance with the literature, this paper appears to confirm the role of regulation in improving the quality of disclosure of non-financial information.

Purpose According to the Directive 2014/95/EU on non-financial information (NFI), from 2017 onwards, large companies of member states will be required to provide a series of social, environmental and governance disclosures. This paper, focusing on the evaluation of the quality of NFI in the UK and Italy before the implementation of the EU Directive, aims to investigate which factors affect the quality of NFI in the comparison between the UK and Italy. Design/methodology/approach To evaluate the “state of the art” of NFI in corporate social disclosure of British and Italian listed companies, a non-financial score is created, based on specific items concerning the requirements of the EU Directive. To this aim, the authors analyzed the corporate disclosures of 343 large listed companies. Findings Findings show that the UK is more compliant than Italy. So, regulation could be important to improve NFI in Italy more than in the UK. The results could represent relevant evidence for European policymakers of the action agenda “emphasizing the importance of national and sub-national CSR policies”. Originality/value This research represents a preliminary analysis on the EU Directive and on its potential effects. Moreover, this study strengthens the previous literature on the quality of non-financial disclosure.