在法律和会计范围的环境信息披露：国际视野【外文翻译】.doc

外文文献翻译
原文:
Environmental Disclosure Within Legal and Accounting Contexts:
An International Perspective
Industrial activity has a large impact on the environment. Recent concerns about global warming and emerging emissions trading markets for greenhouse gases have intensified stakeholder interest in corporate environmental activities and impacts. Response to this increase in interest has varied across corporations and across countries. While for most of the world, environmental reporting has developed voluntarily (., through voluntary standards such as the ), some countries have passed legislation mandating corporate environmental reporting (., Denmark’s “green accounts,” that detail raw materials used and waste produced). The first purpose of this paper is to document diversity in international environmental disclosures. We document that legal origin (or possibly, which colonial power ruled historically) is associated with the degree of cross-country variation in managers’ reports of environmental disclosures. We also explore the relation between reported environmental disclosures and the general level of environmental regulation. We find that more stringent environmental laws are associated with higher levels of reported disclosure. Finally, we relate environmental disclosures to mon type of corporate disclosure: disclosure of accounting information. Accounting disclosures provide an interesting contrast to environmental disclosures because while the precise rules associated with accounting disclosure vary from country to country, there is a much longer tradition of accounting disclosure and most countries have some form of mandated accounting disclosure. We find a strong relation between the level of reported environmental disclosure and the level of reported accounting disclosure regulation.
Prior papers investigate environmental disclosures in individual countries – including Australia (Tilt, 2001), Canada (Li, Richardson, and Thornton, 1997; and McCo