Environmental Reporting Factors: Research Results In Croatia

Environmental responsibility, embedded into environmental management system, is an important element of business sustainability, while environmental accounting and environmental reporting are indispensable management instruments. Implementation of environmental management systems sets the basis for the development of environmental accounting and integrated environmental reporting, respectively the inclusion of environmental issues in finding the new methods of achieving environmental effectiveness, competitiveness and long-term business sustainability. Decision on reporting the environmental information is usually associated with the managerial attitudes and expectations. The purpose of this research is to determine the factors associated with the level of development of environmental reporting in Croatian companies. In accordance with the results from previous research, the key impact factors have been selected. For this purpose, five main hypotheses have been developed and tested using regression model. The level of environmental reporting has been taken as depended variable, and level of development of environmental management system, size, type of industry, form of ownership and environmental management system certification as independent variables. The research has been done on a sample of 164 companies from different types of industry. The result shows that 45% of the sample disclosed environmental information. Furthermore, it has been found that the level of environmental reporting is positively and significantly associated with the level of development of environmental management system. There is no statistically significant relationship between size, industry, ownership and environmental certification.