Social and Environmental Disclosure in the Annual Reports of Jordanian Companies

Abstract

Recently, much attention has been devoted by researchers to study social and environmentaldisclosure among corporations. Most of the studies were conducted in developed countries,with only a handful being undertaken in developing countries. This study aims to investigatethe extent of social and environmental disclosure in the annual reports of Jordanian companiesand examine if the level of disclosure is influenced by size of firm, government ownership andindustry. In particular, disclosure with regard to environmental issues, community involvementand human resource are examined. Using a sample of 60 companies in the manufacturing andservice sectors, content analysis is used to measure the level of disclosure. The findings indicatethat 85% of the companies somehow disclose social and environmental information. Humanresource is the most disclosed theme while the environmental issue had the lowestdisclosure among the companies. In addition, a significant positive association is found betweencompany size and social and environmental disclosure, and companies with high governmentownership tend to have a lower level of disclosure compared to companies with low governmentownership. On the overall, no significant relationship was found between industry typeand the level of social and environmental disclosure. However, when only environmental issuesare examined, manufacturing companies tend to disclose more of the items compared to servicecompanies. Copyright © www.iiste.org