Local GDP Distortion And Corporate Environmental Information Disclosure Management

With the development of the national unified accounting system of local GDP,some regional governments have admitted to the existence of GDP fraud.On the one hand,Local government GDP distortion is a serious government dishonest behavior,which will destroy the local social integrity environment and cause local enterprises to have opportunistic tendencies and behaviors.On the other hand,local government officials manipulate GDP to beautify economic performance for promotion purposes,which will strengthen their intervention in enterprise accounting and environmental information reporting.Therefore,the dishonest behavior of local government will affect the micro decision-making behavior of local enterprises.As the country strengthens its emphasis on the construction of ecological civilization,the supervision of corporate environmental information disclosure by regulatory agencies has gradually strengthened,and corporate environmental information disclosure is facing greater pressure.Then under the influence of the local government’s dishonest behavior of GDP distortion,what kind of environmental information disclosure decision will the enterprise management make? In view of this problem,this paper starts from the perspective of local GDP distortion,and studies the influence of local GDP distortion on enterprise environmental information disclosure management,and preliminarily explores the local government dishonesty behavior and its influence on the decisionmaking behavior of micro enterprises.This paper selects A-share listed companies from 2009 to 2013 as research samples,estimates the real GDP growth rate of prefecture level cities in China by using night light data,and calculates the GDP distortion degree of the prefecture level city governments,then studies the impact of local GDP distortion on enterprise environmental information disclosure management.The research results of this paper show that there is a significant positive correlation between local GDP distortion and enterprise environmental information disclosure management,that is,local government GDP distortion will increase the degree of local enterprise environmental information disclosure management.Further research finds that the local government GDP distortion has a more significant positive impact on the environmental information disclosure management of state-owned holding enterprises and heavy pollution industry enterprises.Higher degree of internal control of the enterprises and higher degree of marketization will restrain the impact of local government GDP distortion on the enterprises environmental information disclosure management.This paper also verifies that local GDP distortion can enhance the degree of enterprise environmental information disclosure management by reducing the social integrity environment and increasing government intervention.According to the research conclusions of this paper,the following suggestions are put forward: the central government should strengthen the supervision of local government affairs,accelerate the pace of national unified accounting of local GDP,and accelerate the construction of enterprise mandatory environmental information disclosure system;local governments should promote the process of regional marketization and strengthen the regulation of environmental information disclosure of state-owned holding enterprises and enterprises in heavy polluting industries;enterprises should strengthen their internal control system construction and truly disclose environmental information.This paper links local government’s dishonest behavior of GDP distortion with enterprise’s opportunistic behavior of environmental information disclosure management,and explores the influence of macro local government behavior on micro enterprise’s environmental decision-making.This paper expands the research on local GDP distortion,enriches the literature on environmental information disclosure management,and provides an empirical basis for the central government to control local government GDP fraud and restrain enterprise environmental information disclosure management behavior.This paper contains 1 figure,14 tables and 184 references.