Analysis of sustainability reports and quality of information disclosed of top brazilian companies

Abstract

The objective of this research is to examine the quality of information disclosed from a sample of Brazilian listed companies, using a multidimensional construct based on economic, environmental and social dimensions of sustainability. The research design combines both quantitative and qualitative methods. The qualitative approach is used in the content analysis procedure and the quantitative is employed for statistical analysis. The target population consists of top 36 sustainable companies (ISE) and 24 with corporate governance practices (NM) in 2011. We find that 37% of the companies achieved score above 0.5; 30% between 0.26 and 0.5 and 33% scored below 0.25, being score zero the worst and one the best score. The best company scored 0.896 and the worst of the 60 companies scored 0.0167. Overall our statistical results confirm that ISE companies tend to disclose more information and in a more adequate way than NM, and in general, the companies are reporting the content in all the three dimensions with same quality level. Furthermore, companies from Infrastructure sector present better quality content reported when compared to Service companies. We conclude that a good sustainability report is directly related to the good content in all the tree dimensions, regardless the economic sector and these reports still have a big room for improvement, which echoes within the literature analyzed. Companies need to disclose their information in a more integrated way, addressing sustainability issues under the scope of business strategy.