Institutional Pressures on Environmental Information Disclosure by Companies in BRICS Countries

Abstract

We intended to identify the influence of institutional pressures such as legal, regulatory and social charges in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS countries) on level of environmental information disclosure of local electricity companies. We used content analysis to analyze the annual and sustainability reports of 90 companies of BRICS countries from electricity sector and used ANOVA, t-test, Kruskal-Wallis test, Tukey's post-hoc test and regression tree to analyze the data according to the Institutional Theory. We concluded that companies with the highest level of disclosure are those that are part of sustainability indexes. This result highlights the mimetic isomorphism and the influence of cultural pressures. Companies of the sample that present the lowest level of disclosure are those based in Common Law or mixed legal system countries and they are not part of any sustainability indexes. Among the companies studied, Brazilian and Russian companies presented a higher level of environmental disclosure than Chinese and Indian ones. These findings highlights the importance of the role that institutions such as stock exchanges and their sustainability indexes play on influencing the disclosure of environmental information, having a bigger influence on disclosure than legal requirements and external verification of reports.