The Bilateral Association Between Discretionary Environmental Disclosure Quality and Economic Performance: An Asian Perspective

This paper investigates the two-way association between economic performance and quality of discretionary disclosure of sustainable environmental practices. The study focuses on seven Asian countries, namely, India, Japan, China, South Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia and Israel. The result of primary research design suggests that economic performance and discretionary environmental disclosure quality are not simultaneously related and thus are not endogenous. Accepting this primary outcome, the OLS reveals sustainable environmental practices and the discretionary disclosures of the same has negative or very low positive as well as insignificant association with the economic performance of the firm. On the other hand, the investigation on the dependence of discretionary environmental disclosure on the economic performance reports mixed results with no clear trend. Interestingly, the study shows that the companies that belong to environmentally sensitive industries tend to disclose less objective information leading to lower quality disclosures. Similar to this, companies that belong to countries having high relative emissions also show a less informative and low quality of disclosure.