Social and Environmental Disclosure in the Annual Reports of Jordanian Companies

Abstract

Recently, much attention has been devoted by researchers to study social and environmental 
disclosure among corporations. Most of the studies were conducted in developed countries, 
with only a handful being undertaken in developing countries. This study aims to investigate 
the extent of social and environmental disclosure in the annual reports of Jordanian companies 
and examine if the level of disclosure is influenced by size of firm, government ownership and 
industry. In particular, disclosure with regard to environmental issues, community involvement 
and human resource are examined. Using a sample of 60 companies in the manufacturing and 
service sectors, content analysis is used to measure the level of disclosure. The findings indi
cate that 85% of the companies somehow disclose social and environmental information. Hu
man resource is the most disclosed theme while the environmental issue had the lowest 
disclosure among the companies. In addition, a significant positive association is found be
tween company size and social and environmental disclosure, and companies with high govern
ment ownership tend to have a lower level of disclosure compared to companies with low gov
ernment ownership. On the overall, no significant relationship was found between industry type 
and the level of social and environmental disclosure. However, when only environmental issues 
are examined, manufacturing companies tend to disclose more of the items compared to service 
companies.