Influencing Factors Of Quality Of Environmental Information Disclosure

In December 2011, the seventh National Environmental Protection Conference arranged the overall environmental protection work for the "12 Five Year Plan" and required to carry out this work through unifying the thought, executing the environmental protection layout, increasing the supervision. And also, the functionaries from some enterprises such as Huaneng, Datang, Huadian, China Guodian Cooperation, China Power Investment Cooperation, State Grid Cooperation of China, CNPC, SINOPEC have signed the responsibility documents for the major pollutants emission reduction goals, indicating that the government have paid much attention to the environmental protection. For enterprises, it is impossible to separate environmental protection and environmental information Disclosure. Publication of environmental information, on the one hand, is a effective tool for the enterprises to convey the environmental condition and risk to the various stakeholders; on the other hand, it is also an essential way for people to know and oversee the cooperation-related environment activities. Thus, the quality of environmental accounting information publication is becoming an issue closely associated with stakeholders’decisions and concerned by the public.In this study, we have looked back and evaluated the domestic and foreign scholar’s research work. For the factors that influences environmental information disclosure, foreign scholars focus on the cooperation interior factors such as cooperation character, corporate governance and exterior factors for example the government supervision, social medias, the public, regional economic level and so on. Our domestic scholars in general, are apt to select some industry or some year to execute the similar study. Considering the new regulations and policy for the environmental information in our country and the gradually increased public consciousness of environmental protection, it is very necessary to make a proper evaluation about the disclosure of environmental information for the listed corporations which are regarded as heavy pollution companies in China recently, and further to probe into the influencing factors.Use the achievements of former scholars and the requests of China Securities Regulatory Commission, this paper prefers four aspects to evaluate the disclosure quality characteristics of environmental information, there are whole level, completeness, significance and reliability. Based on this, this article constructed four indicators of the quality of environmental information disclosure. After collated and analysed the environmental information disclosed in the annual reports and Social Responsibility Report of the A-share listed companies from 2007 to 2010, we can get each situation of the three quality characteristics of environmental information discourse, completeness, significance, reliability and the overall quality situation. We found that environmental information disclosure quality in the whole level has a rising trend, but we can also found that most of the list companies prefers to disclose more complete information rather than more reliable and significant information. Based on sustainable development theory, externality theory, accountability theory, asymmetric theory, organization theory of legitimacy, stakeholder theory,we propose 12 hypotheticals that may affect the quality of environmental information discourse form 6 parts below: the pressure of stakeholders, strategic approaches of management, the company’s economic performance, characteristic of the company and corporate governance, then use EV1EWS6.0 to verified these hypotheticals.The results showed that financial leverage, in which year, strategic approaches of management, company size, listing location and the ratio of independent directors of the company have a significant impact on quality of environmental information in the whole level. To the three characteristics of the environmental information disclosure quality, effects of these influencing factors are not entirely consistent. State-owned companies are obviously report more completely environmental informations, while low ownership concentration improving the reliability of environmental information disclosure.Finally, we get conclusion and put forward relevant policy recommendations combined with China’s actual conditions. To improve the quality of our companys’ environmental information disclosure quality, China should strengthen the Government’s regulatory functions actively and construct a better institution system of environmental information disclosure. Play the role of an independent third party audit is also an effective way. At the same time, we should stimulate the enterprise management’s environmental awareness and optimize the corporate governance.