Social and Environmental Disclosure by Parastatals and Companies Listed on the Botswana Stock Exchange

Abstract

The need to communicate social and environmental effects of business operations to society has been with us forover four decades now. However, due to diverse factors the pace of introducing social and environmentalreporting in developing countries has been slow. The purposes of this study are: to determine whether companieslisted on the Botswana Stock Exchange and Parastatals in Botswana report on social and environmental issues intheir annual reports and to what extent they disclose such information; to establish whether there is a differencein the level of reporting between listed companies and parastatals; and to determine whether size, type ofindustry and ownership influence the extent of disclosure. All listed companies and parastatals operating inBotswana formed the population of this study. Secondary data obtained from annual reports was reviewed andcontent analysis was employed to determine the extent of social and environment reporting. The extent ofdisclosure was measured using number of sentences describing the key themes such as human resources,environmental issues and community involvement. Regression analysis was used to find the association betweendependent variable (extent of disclosure) and three independent variables namely size of the company,ownership and type of industry. The results suggest that social and environment reporting exists in Botswanaentities and listed companies tend to disclose more than parastatals. The findings also show that size, type ofindustry and ownership are not good predictors of the level of social and environmental disclosure in Botswanaentities.