Corporate Social and Environmental Disclosure in Developing Countries: Evidence from Bangladesh

This is an exploratory study designed to investigate the extent and nature of social and environmental reporting in corporate annual reports. Specifically, we examine the relationship between social and environmental disclosure and several corporate attributes in a developing country, Bangladesh. In order to do this, we have developed and utilized a disclosure index to measure the extent of disclosure made by companies in corporate annual reports. This study reports significant differences in levels of social and environmental disclosure, as measured by the mean values of the social and environmental disclosure index in Bangladesh. This study reports that a very few companies in Bangladesh are making efforts to provide social and environmental information on a voluntary basis, which are mostly qualitative in nature. Companies in Bangladesh appeared to have the lowest levels of social and environmental disclosure. It was also found that significant number of the lowest ranking companies suffered losses during the period under study and significant proportions of the ranking companies were subsidiaries of multinational companies or large corporations