Environmental Accounting Disclosures and Financial Performance in India
Environmental Accounting Disclosures and Financial Performance in India
PERFORMANCE IN INDIA
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The current research study aspires to examine the outcome of environmental accounting on
financial performance amongst top 100 companies of Indian origin as per their market-cap in
the year financial year 2018-19. For measuring independent variables in this study
environmental index for environmental disclosure has been used. ROA, EPS, ROE and Profit
Margin are used as the dependent variables for the study to act as the parameter for
measurement of financial performance. No noteworthy relationship was found between TED,
Profit Margin and EPS. The multivariate test shows that Environmental Disclosures have a
significant effect on ROA and ROE. On the basis of the analysis, it is suggested that the
Indian companies need to keep pace with the regulatory framework put in place by the
government and other regulatory bodies. This will ensure that the companies invest in
improving their environmental performance records which in turn would have positive effect
Shareholder’s Net Worth.
In the times when global warming, increasing water levels in seas and oceans, depletion of
ozone layer and many more such problems have engulfed the entire world, it seems important
that mankind and especially the big business houses play their part in conserving and
improving the environment around them. The major reasons for such a grave situation has
been the fast industrialisation and the resultant pollution. So it makes sense that corporate
sector take a front seat for mending the environment too; given the kind of financial and
human capital they have.
Another major reason for such an act is the consumer. Today a consumer not only does a cost
benefit analysis before buying a product, rather he also analyses the actions of the company
offering the product. Indian Judicial system has also started taking the companies to task if
they default in any regulatory specifications issued to them. For example Maggie was banned
by a court order for a long time when it was found that it was not following the guidelines
issued by Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), public at large also
boycotted its use. Coca Cola which is a leading name in beverages industry also defaulted in
compliance and rather it took the guidelines for granted. Its bottling plant in Kala Dera near
Jaipur was shut down after a local campaign was started by Rameshwar Kudi on grounds of
depleting ground water from the area around it. After this Coca Cola has had problems in
running and expanding its work in India. Its’ another plant in Kerela was also shut down and
the plant in Varanasi was stopped in starting its expanded facility. Very recently in the state
of Rajasthan in India were instructed strictly to treat the waste water before disposing it in
any water body the contemplators were sealed and fined. Thereby making it very clear that
the government and judiciary have joined hands to prosecute all the defaulters on charges
especially concerning people at large and environmental concerns top the list. On a positive
noteefforts made by companies towards a sustainable environment converts into better sales
for the product offerings and thus increases profitability and net worth of the company.
Environmental accounting is a term used for the various environmental issues addressed by a
company in its financial statement specifically its Annual report. For the purpose of defining
it one can put it in the following words, ‘Environmental Accounting refers to the
identification, measurement and allocation of environmental costs of a business.’ It involves
integration of these costs into business and helps in communicating such information to the
Financial Performance refers to a subjective measure of how effectively a firm can use its
assets to do its core business and generate revenues. The term is also used as a general
measure of a firm's overall financial health over a given period of time. “It is the process of
measuring the results of a firm's policies and operations in monetary terms. It can also be
used to evaluate similar firms from the same industry or to compare industries or sectors in
collectively.”(Chaturvedi,A.) Here in this study a comparison between firms from different
sectors has been done to find the relationship between environmental disclosures and
financial performance of some of the biggest companies in India. The measures of financial
performance taken here are ROA, ROE, Net Profit Margin and EPS of selected companies.
In India till now environmental accounting has not been made compulsory but The
Constitution of India (Article 51A) require as one of fundamental duties of every citizen of
India to protect and improve the natural environment; hence this statement imposes
environmental responsibility on the corporate as well. Not only article 51A specifies
environmental responsibility but various other laws have been enacted for environmental
protection such as Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act. 1974, Forest
Conservation Act 1980, Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act 1981, Environment
In the light of the above discussion this research paper aims at deliberating and unfolding the
reality between the norms put forward and the actual work done by the corporate sector of
India. Since now India has somewhat progressed from a developing economy to fast
developing economy a lot of changes have come in the mind set of general public and the
professional working in corporate India. All this has raised a concern regarding the
environmental concerns and the environmental rules being followed by big companies. The
policy makers under the pressure of global environmental groups and governing authorities
like UNICEF have created guidelines and signed environmental protection treaties but the
actual work has to be done by the companies, that too; has to start from the biggest of the
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
In past a lot of studies have been done on the environmental accounting, some of those
studies were studied to create an understanding for the current topic which are as under -
Aggarwal, P. (2013). It is a review paper which analysed both types of papers in which
positive and negative relationship was concluded between financial performance and
environmental accounting. The paper concluded that factors which lead to positive
relationship are good stakeholder relations; improveded reputation; talent retention of better
qualified employees etc.(Norhasimah Md Nor, 2016) Opine that though environmental
accounting is optional but a lot of companies voluntary engage into undertaking the activities
for saving the environment and also try to be proactive in undertaking such activities. The
study was conducted on Malaysia in the year 2011. It was concluded that be recommended to
use other indicators to measure financial performance to give more favorable findings to the
study.(Vijaya Lakshmi, 2018)Environmental Accounting by corporate revels the amount of
contribution given by environment to them and also the environmental damage caused by the
industrial activities in an economy. In India environmental Accounting is not followed by a
lot of companies so it at just a stage where it has just started being practiced by the corporate
by majorly only by the big companies. Indian companies follow the rules and regulation but
a proactive role is not being played by any company.
(T Moses, GN Ogbonna, 2019) examined the effect of environmental accounting on the
economic development in Nigeria. The study concluded that in Nigeria environmental
accounting practices adopted by the companies did not play an pivotal role in progress of the
economy. Hence, suggested to the government to augment the functioning of environmental
laws in the country to make it more stringent for business organizations to surpass their
(Prakash, 2016) Research paper short listed 16 parameters to analyze whether companies
from different sectors in India like oil, textile, shipping etc follow environmental norms or
not. It was concluded that though there are no legal compulsion on the companies to account
and report for the environmental issues but still they are doing it voluntarily as they
understand the importance of environment for long term sustainability. (Khandelwal,A. 2012)
emphasized that though the companies are involved in social activities like environment but
there is a need to regularize it by making it a law, and later on it was included in the policies
for corporate to follow in India. (Alok Kumar Pramanik, 2008) This paper recognises that
environmental accounting and reporting practices should be made mandatory in every
country but this has not happened in most of the countries. The paper proposes that there is an
urgent need to take steps to formulate environmental accounting and disclosure rules
nationally and globally.Makori, D. M., &Jagongo, A. (2013) recommended that government
should make provision for tax credit to organizations which follow environmental laws and
that environmental reporting should be made compulsory in India in order to improve
reporting and compliance.
Pahuja, S. (2009) in the paper which shows relationship between environmental disclosures
and corporate characteristics in manufacturing sector of India has been able to make an
analysis of the companies on 23 items of environmental information to find if certain kind of
companies follow a certain pattern in environmental disclosures. Omnamasivaya, B. (2017)
this paper actually studied the opposite what the current aims at finding but this gave a very
good opportunity for understanding the basic concept in environmental accounting. Here it
was analysed whether a better financial performance has a positive impact on the
environmental accounting disclosure practices of the companies listed on NSE over a period
of 5 years. Variables considered for the study are NPM, ROCE, EPS, DPS, ROA, ROE, P/E,
DPR, ROS and MPS. The study concluded in a positive relationship between the two. Same
(Mustaruddin Saleh, 2012) The paper deducted that corporate social responsibility has a
positive and significant relation on Financial Performance of a company. Dimensions like
employee relations and community involvement, are positively related to financial
performance. This proves that CSR practices can be considered as effort to improve the
financial performance of PLCs in Malaysia. (Rahman, 2009)This study was conducted to
inspect the relationship between environmental disclosure and financial performance among
the companies in Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand that voluntarily disclose environmental
information in their financial reports. A sample of Two hundred and fifty (250) companies
listed on stock exchanges of Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. The results suggest that the
performance of the company has no relationship to the environmental disclosure.
(Omnamasivaya, B. A., & Prasad, M. S. V. 2016) conducted a similar study on stocks listed
on Bombay Stock Exchange over period of five years. They calculated Environmental
Accounting Disclosure Index (EADI) for each company for each year and then the five-year
average was considered for final study. The financial variables taken into consideration were
Net Profit Margin (NPM), Return on Capital Employed (ROCE), Earning Per Share (EPS),
Dividend Per Share (DPS), Return on Assets (ROA), Return on Equity (ROE), Price-
3. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
The population of this study comprises of the listed companies in BSE. Among these the top
100 companies as per the market capitalization in year 2018-19, has been selected as sample.
The selection of top companies is due to numerous reasons. The large companies undertake
more activities and have larger impact on the society since they are more visible (Hackston
and Milne, 1996) and also large companies are believed to have more information which
allows them to engage more with corporate governance, social and environmental
responsibility (Aerts, Cormier, Gordon, and Magnan, 2006). Other than that, large companies
The environmental index for environmental disclosure as based on Razeed (2010) are taken
as Independent Variable for the study. Andfinancial performance is taken as dependent
variable, which has been measured by the four indicators of financial performance i.e. Return
on Assets (ROA), Earnings per Share (EPS), Return on Equity (ROE) and Profit margin of
the firms.
• To observe how much the top listed companies are disclosing about the environmental
indexes.
• To examine the relationship between Environmental disclosure and Financial
Performance of the companies
This research had already selected group of companies, thus non-probability sampling
techniques would be suitable for this study. Under non-probability sampling there are two
types of sampling techniques which are convenience and purposive sampling. The purposive
sampling is used to group the Top 100 Company of Market Capitalization as the specific
types of respondents that can provide the required information.
The data collected is secondary data in nature, which has been collected by reviewing the
annual report of the top 100 Companies of Market Capitalization of year 2018-19.To check
the relationship between total environmental disclosure (TED) and Financial Performance
correlation is applied. And to check effectof TED on financial performance of the companies
MANOVA is applied.
Table:5.1 shows the extent to which companies are following the environmental disclosure
index. It is observed that the variables that have been disclosed by all the companies is
statement/existence/disclosure of environmental concern(100), followed by
acknowledgement of impact of activities (98) , Recognition of Government Regulations (93)
and Presence of Environmental Department and Personnel (93).The anticipated pattern of
future environmental spending and assessment of actual/contingent liabilities which is index
number 18 and 19 has the least index that had been disclosed in annual reports. Only 36
companies out of 100 have disclosed the index number 18 and only 33 companies have
disclosed the index number 19.
The mean value for total environmental disclosure (TED) which is the independent variable
of this study is 14.59. The standard deviation value and variance value of TED is 4.39 and
19.29. The minimum value of TED shows that there are companies which disclosed very
little environmental information as the value stated is 4.00. Besides, the maximum value
shows the highest value that the company disclosed all the 20 environmental indexes used in
this study. The dependent variable used in this study is financial performances as the
financial performance is measured by using ROA, ROE, EPS and Profit Margin. The first
dependent variable is ROA, the mean for the variable is 9.80 whereas the standard deviation
of the variable is 8.23 and the variance shows the value of 67.75. The maximum value shows
the highest ROA between the companies analysed in this study as the highest value recorded
is 49.30 whereas the minimum value which shows the lowest ROA recorded which is -7.50.
The second dependent variable used in this study is ROE, the mean value stated for this
variable is 14.46. The value for standard deviation and variance of this variable is 18.91 and
357.48 respectively. The maximum value of ROE is 77.0 and the minimum value stated for
this variable is at the lowest as the value is negative value which is -90.00. Furthermore, the
third dependent variable used in this study to measure the financial performance is EPS, the
mean value of this variable is 76.72. This variable also shows that the standard deviation of
278.55 whereas the variance of this variable stated at 77592.11. The lowest EPS recorded
among 100 companies used in this study is showed by the minimum value which is -99.50
and the highest value among the companies is determine by the maximum value which is
2666.50. Last but not the least, the fourth variable used is profit margin as the mean value
stated for this variable is 11.65.the standard deviation and the variance stated for this variable
The standard deviation of Total Environmental Disclosures (TED), Return on Assets, Return
on Equity and Profit margin is low which also shows that data are clustered around the mean .
This displays the data is more reliable. In case of Earning per share, the standard deviation is
too high, which displays the data is widely spread. Variance is the average of the squared
distances from each point to the mean. Variance in Total Environmental Disclosures (TED) is
the lowest ,followed by Profit Margin, Return on Assets and Return on Equity . A smaller
variance indicates low variations in the data set i.e. the data are points are closer to each
other. Where as the variance in Earning per share is very high indicating the data points are
very wide spread from one another.
5.1MULTIVARIATE TESTS
Hypothesis
Effect Value F df Error df Sig.
Intercept Pillai's Trace 0.444 15.961b 4 80 0
Wilks' Lambda 0.556 15.961b 4 80 0
Hotelling's Trace 0.798 15.961b 4 80 0
Roy's Largest Root 0.798 15.961b 4 80 0
TED Pillai's Trace 0.805 1.306 64 332 0.071
Wilks' Lambda 0.395 1.32 64 315.462 0.065
Hotelling's Trace 1.085 1.331 64 314 0.059
Roy's Largest Root 0.5 2.591c 16 83 0.003
a. Design: Intercept + TED
b. Exact statistic
c. The statistic is an upper bound on F that yields a lower bound on the significance level.
d. Computed using alpha = .05
Source :Self made using SPSS Software .
The above is the MANOVA using Pillai’s Trace Test. Pillai's trace is a positive-valued
statistic. Increasing values of the statistic indicate effects that contribute more to the model.
The p value < 0.05, indicates a significant effect of TED on financial performance of the
companies. Therefore, null hypothesis is not accepted.
Table shows a summary table of Levene’s test of equality of variances for each of the
dependent variables. Levene’s test is showing significant for all dependent variables because
the assumption of homogeneity of variance has not been met.
Because the MANOVA was significant we will now examine the univariate ANOVA results.
To determine how the dependent variable, differ for the independent variable, Test of
Between- Subjects effect is checked. The row labelled TED shows the ANOVA summary for
ROA, ROE, EPS and Profit Margin. It is observed that TED has a statistically significant
effect on ROA and ROE as p value < 0.05 whereas TED has an insignificant effect on EPS
and profit Margin.
6. CONCLUSION
This study examines the relationship between environmental disclosures done by the top 100
companies listed on the Indian Stock Marketand their financial performance in the financial
The finding of this study resulted in showing that there is a significant relationship between
total environmental disclosure and ROA and ROE. However, the findings for other two
variables which are profit Margin and EPS showed no significant relationship between total
environmental disclosures. The multivariate test shows a significant effect of Environmental
Disclosures on financial performance. Further, when the test of between- subjects is checked,
it is observed that Environmental Disclosures have a significant effect on ROA and ROE. In
general, the environmental disclosure in India is on the growth stage as most on Indian
companies are aware about the environmental concerns and regulation put forward by the
government. The companies need to keep pace with the regulatory framework put in place by
government and other regulatory bodies. This will ensure that the Companies invest in
improving their environmental performance records. This study adds in the literature review
on the corporate governance area particularly on the environmental disclosure that will help
the authority body to come out with an exhaustive structure or guideline on the admission of
the environmental disclosure in the annual report.
There are some boundaries to this study which are explained here after. Annual reports were
used as research instrument for collecting required data but it fell short with respect to some
companies under consideration as they disclosed their environmental information in separate
statement in place of annual report. In addition, the data of this study is considered only top
100 public listed companies for market capitalization 2019 and one year (2018-19) due to
limited time frame. Hence, it would be suggested to supplement the research by making use
of other group in order to generalize the analysis as the companies studied in this research
already specified without considering small company. Further, it is recommended to
undertake a year on year study on yearly basis as it may help to draw the movement of
environmental disclosure. In addition, we have analyzed annual report for the financial year
ending 2019 as the data for the year 2020 was unavailable at the time the research was
conducted. Thus, it is suggested to make use of the annual report of financial year 2020 as to
gauge the updated and current trend of environmental disclosure for these companies. Apart
from that, the environmental index of this research is specified to only 20 indexes as adapted
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APPENDIX -I
2018-19
TOTAL
PROFIT ENVIRONMENT
COMPANY ROA ROE EPS MARGIN AL
PIRAMAL ENTERPRISES
(NCHP) 6.9 5.4 79.7 11.1 19
AUROBINDO PHARMA
(AUBD) 11.8 20.7 41.4 14.7 16
UNITED
BREWERIES(UDBS) 9.4 14.7 14.9 7 19