Environmental reporting in Greece: The Athens stock exchange

Abstract

There is a growing interest in Greece about subjects such as sustainable development, corporate social responsibility and corporate environmental performance. They are an after-effect of the international calls about the responsibility of corporations towards natural environment. Therefore, Greek corporations have started implementing practices for better environmental performance and reporting them to the public. The present research aimed to investigate Greek corporations’ disclosures about their behavior towards the protection of natural environment. The research year was 2007. It examined the listed corporations in Greek stock market and tested whether there were differences among company groups in terms of environmental reporting. It also tested whether the notion that the environmentally sensitive sectors usually disclose more environment related data compared to other sectors is confirmed in the Greek context. Then the research sought on which environment related aspect tend the Greek companies to report on and finally it clustered them in similar groups of reporting extent. Among other things, the results showed that few corporations in Greece reported in 2007 on environmental issues. Key words: Greece, Athens stock exchange, Greek corporations, protection of natural environment, environmental reporting, environmental expenditure.