The Level of Voluntary Disclosure in the Annual Reports of Listed Corporations in Fiji: A Case Study of South Pacific Stock Exchange Listed Corporations

Abstract

This paper investigates the level of voluntary disclosure by listed Corporations of South Pacific Stock Exchange (SPSE). The major objective of the paper is to contribute towards the literature on level of voluntary disclosure in a developing country context. The focal point of the research was to use the empirical data from the twelve of the 2019 audited listed company annual reports from the SPSE. This research is informed by organizational legitimacy theory. The paper shows that the level of voluntary disclosure in SPSE companies has increased from the previous studies. However, the increase is not substantial. The paper shows that corporations who do not have monopoly power fear about their social contract and disclose more voluntary information in order to legitimize their activity. Corporations with monopoly power do not care about their social contract as they are certain that the society has no choice but to accept them as they are the only one in the market, so they do not legitimize their activity to a great extent. Legitimacy theory holds true for non-monopoly firms and does not hold true for monopoly firms.