Marketization Index、Ultimate Controller And Environmental Information Disclosures

Since the reform and opening-up, China’s economic development has made great achievements. However, along with the high pace of economic development, environmental pollution is increasingly serious, which is attracting our attention. In recent years, the environmental pollution accidents from companies has been occurring frequently, such as the Songhua River Water Pollution Incident in2005, the Cadmium Pollution Incidents of North River in Guangdong Province in2005,the Arsenic Pollution in Yang Zonghai Lake in Yunnan Event in2008,the Acid Leakage From Zijin Copper Event in2010, and so on. Environmental pollution incidents have a significant influence on people’s health, ecological environment and social stabilities. As the subject of pollution emissions, the companies not only make money, but also take responsibilities to environment protection. So, it become the focus how the company takes responsibility to environment protection in accounting information. In January,2001, the Accounting Society of China has established the Professional Committee of Environmental Accounting, which aims to propagate the environmental policies and regulations, to take on the study on environmental theories, to summarize the experience of environmental accounting work, to introduce the dynamics of foreign studies and practices and to promote China’s accounting practices work. Since the21st century, domestic scholars has taken large number of researches on environmental information disclosures and has made lots of achievements. Based on the previous research results, this dissertation, taking the external institutional environment and internal equity property of companies, empirically studied the environmental information disclosures of the listed corporations in the main polluted industry from the perspective of marketization index and ultimate controller, which had important theoretical and practical significances.Firstly, this dissertation reviewed the current researches in China and abroad on environmental accounting information disclose. Secondly, this dissertation explained the evolution procession of the institution of environmental information disclosure and analyzed the function mechanism of related classical theories on the environmental information disclosures of companies. Thirdly, this dissertation carried on an empirically research on the influence of the marketization index and ultimate controller on the companies’ environmental information disclosures. This results of the research showed that there is a positive relationship between marketization index and the listed corporations’environmental information disclosures, and the listed corporations, located in the regions with higher marketization index, had a higher index of environmental information disclosures. The index of ultimate state-owned listed corporations is obviously higher than the index of ultimate non-state-owned listed corporations. The influence of marketization on the corporations’environmental information disclosures is restricted by the property of internal ultimate controller. In the ultimate non-state-owned corporations, the influence of marketization on the environmental information disclosures is larger and the influence of external institutional environment on the corporations’ environmental information disclosures is restricted by the internal equity property. Finally, this dissertation summarized the research conclusions and put forward some targeted suggestions.