La disclosure dell'informativa ambientale nelle imprese italiane

In this paper we empirically tested the level and evolution of (voluntary) environmental disclosure made by Italian companies listed on the Milan Stock Exchange both in 2006 and 2009. The years 2006 and 2009 were chosen as the years respectively preceding and following the introduction of Legislative Decree no. 32/2007, that introduced for the first time in Italy the voluntary environmental disclosure by amending Article 2428 of the Civil Code. The purpose of our study is to assess whether environmental disclosure has been fully implemented in Italian companies and how it has evolved over the years. We used a multivariate regression analysis, applied the OLS method, for estimating the environmental disclosure as a function of a set of variables, to investigate which are the determinants of environmental disclosure. The results show the positive and statistically significant effect of the legislative decree no. 32 of 2007 on the level of environmental voluntary disclosure. We found, unlike previous studies, an inverse (negative) and statistically significant relationship between environmental disclosure and the level of minority interests, the presence of international audit firm (Big 4), the environmental performance, the profitability and the foreign listing. We also verified that the environmental disclosure is influenced by the company size and the Government’s and its Agencies’ shareholding. The other variables (business industry, leverage and listing age) do not have a statistically significant relationship with environmental disclosure. Our findings add to the literature by examining with an empirical regression the environmental disclosure in Italian companies. As a further contribution, this paper also extends its analysis to all financial reporting documents, i.e. not merely the annual reports of individual corporations and the consolidated financial statements of corporate groups (with special reference to the explanatory notes ), but also the Management Report (in the new amended layout introduced by Legislative Decree no. 32/2007 – limited to the analysis of year 2009), the sustainability and the corporate governance reports. Despite the contributions of the literature, it is our duty to express some reflections about two limits of our analysis. Firstly, the number of the sample analysed is quite small (only 20 firms), because there is not a database about an indicator of atmospheric pollution in Italy. Also, our analysis describes the determinants of voluntary environmental disclosure of only listed Italian firms.