Anti-corruption reporting in emerging country multinationals

Purpose - Based on a lens of analysis combining legitimacy and stakeholder theories, this paper aims to explore some factors which influence anti-corruption (AC) reporting in large multinationals from emerging countries. Design/methodology/approach - An ordinal logistic regression is used to assess the relation between the AC reporting and multinationals’ industrial affiliation, number of countries of operations, membership of the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) and public ownership. The sample was drawn from the 2016 Transparency International Report “Transparency in Corporate Reporting – Assessing Emerging Market Multinationals”. Findings - Evidence suggests that in emerging countries, listed multinationals, which operate in a large number of countries or are members of the UNGC, present significant levels of AC reporting. Unexpectedly, results also suggest that such reporting is not significantly affected by the corruption risk level of the industries to which the multinationals belong. Finally, results suggest that in emerging markets, the dependency for resources may also affect AC reporting. Originality/value - This paper contributes to the extant literature, by exploring different determinants of AC reporting, namely, a thus far unexplored one: public vs private ownership. This paper also contributes to the literature by providing insights into the relationships in a specific context: that of emerging countries. Finally, the reliance on the international community for the provision of resources is shown as a factor that potentially affects AC reporting.