Non-Financial Information Disclosures and Environmental Protection—Evidence from Romania and Greece

Abstract

Currently, sustainability and sustainable development are issues that concern society due to the high degree of pollution and the measures taken that, in many cases, do not prove their efficiency. Economic entities are aware that their involvement in the community has become necessary for the sustainable development of any business. The promotion of responsibility towards the environment is an important principle of corporate social responsibility (CSR), which is becoming an obligation that can no longer be exempted. Our intention in this paper was to study the changes generated by the European Union (EU) Directive 2014/95 regarding the manner in which oil entities listed at the Bucharest Stock Exchange (BSE) and the Athens Stock Exchange (ATHEX) between 2014 and 2018, report environment-related information. We also identified whether entities in fields that are known as polluting were more sensitive to environmental factors and if they tended to report more information compared to other business sectors. To achieve these objectives, we used qualitative and quantitative research. Namely, we analyzed the entities’ non-financial reports, to identify their social responsibility actions, and we tested if they were correlated with the environment protection and also with the 2014/95 European directive stipulations. For the entities operating in this polluting area, demonstrating transparency regarding the efforts and investments made to counteract the environmental impacts is important. Non-financial corporate reporting can be an opportunity to integrate sustainability into a company’s business practices and strategies to obtain benefits and to increase efficiency and, thus, to increase stakeholder confidence. The contribution of our study is to highlight the importance of non-financial information for the sustainable development of companies and the environment.

Trend and relationship between environmental accounting disclosure and environmental performance for mining companies listed in China

“…The trend analysis affirms hypothesis 1, which says mining companies comply with environmental information disclosure in China. The findings from our study are in line with the findings of Artene et al 2020 ; Giannarakis et al 2019 ; and Pan et al 2020 . Artene et al ( 2020 ) using a sample of 65 Romanian listed companies from 2011 to 2013 found that the environmental information disclosure trends have seen a major improvement over the past decade.…”

“…The findings from our study are in line with the findings of Artene et al 2020 ; Giannarakis et al 2019 ; and Pan et al 2020 . Artene et al ( 2020 ) using a sample of 65 Romanian listed companies from 2011 to 2013 found that the environmental information disclosure trends have seen a major improvement over the past decade. Similarly, Giannarakis et al ( 2019 ) show that companies which have established environmental management systems has made the greatest contribution to its environmental protection awards, and in effect have improved the trends of environmental disclosures.…”

“…This has raised concerns for environmental compliance. Several countries have paid attention to the importance of environmental information disclosure (Artene et al 2020 ; Belhaj and Damak-Ayadi 2011 ; Chen et al 2019 ; Murdifin et al 2019 ). After years of exploration and attempts, the information disclosure system has been revised and improved significantly.…”

Assessing the Effects of Directive 2014/95/EU on Nonfinancial Information Reporting: Evidence from Italian and Spanish Listed Companies

“…Some studies analysed the convergence of national laws transposing the NFI Directive (Aureli et al 2019;Aureli et al 2020). Other studies have verified how the new legislation contributes to the harmonisation of NFI reporting practices and how it can affect the level of disclosure (Dumitru et al 2017;Venturelli et al 2019;Mion and Loza Adaui 2019;Artene et al 2020). On an international level, Manes-Rossi et al (2018) analysed the compliance level of the 50 largest European companies, while Nicolò et al (2020) addressed the impact of the EU Directive on the NFI provided in the integrated reports of 22 European state-owned enterprises.…”

Modeling Ways to Improve Green Growth and Environmental Protection in the Context of Governance

“…Green growth is a model of the economy that improves human well-being and social justice while significantly reducing environmental risks and scarcity of environmental resources. The transition to a green economy depends on solving two related tasks to maintain the sustainability of ecosystems and identify ways to reduce the use of resources in production and consumption, as well as to reduce their impact on the environment (Artene et al, 2020).…”