An investigation of environmental disclosure by local listed companies and multinational companies (MNCs) in Malaysia for the period ended 1999 : an empirical evidence / Nor Ashikin Alias

The purpose of this study is to investigate the nature of environmental information disclosure practices by Malaysian listed companies in order to find out the quality and the quantity or volume of the environmental disclosures in annual reports. It also attempts to investigate some potential relationships between corporate characteristics in terms of size, financial performance and company's operational status and the amount of environmental disclosure. The sample chosen consisted of 74 Malaysian companies drawn from seven industries and was examined using content analysis with sentences as a unit of measurement. The Spearman's rank Correlation, Crosstabulation Chi-Square Test and Kruskal-Wallis Test were performed to test the hypotheses. The result shows that there is no significant difference between the quality and the quantity of environmental information disclosure between MNCs and local listed companies in Malaysia. The present study also indicates that there is no significant relationship between company size, financial performance and operational status with the amount of the environmental information disclosure.