Social and Environmental Disclosure in the Annual Reports of Jordanian Companies

Abstract

Recently, much attention has been devoted by researchers to study social and environmental disclosure among corporations. Most of the studies were conducted in developed countries, with only a handful being undertaken in developing countries. This study aims to investigate the extent of social and environmental disclosure in the annual reports of Jordanian companies and examine if the level of disclosure is influenced by size of firm, government ownership and industry. In particular, disclosure with regard to environmental issues, community involvement
and human resource are examined. Using a sample of 60 companies in the manufacturing and service sectors, content analysis is used to measure the level of disclosure. The findings indicate that 85% of the companies somehow disclose social and environmental information. Human resource is the most disclosed theme while the environmental issue had the lowest
disclosure among the companies. In addition, a significant positive association is found between company size and social and environmental
disclosure, and companies with high government ownership tend to have a
lower level of disclosure compared to companies with low government ownership. On the overall, no significant relationship was found between
industry type and the level of social and environmental disclosure. However, when only environmental issues are examined, manufacturing
companies tend to disclose more of the items compared to service  companies.