A note on corporate social disclosure practices in developing countries: The case of Malaysia and Singapore

Abstract

Most studies on corporate social disclosure (CSD) have focused on the industrialised countries of Europe, United States and Australia (for example, Dierkes & Preston, 1977; Beresford & Cowen, 1979; Brockhoff, 1979). Even international comparative studies of CSD concentrated on analyses of the similarities and differences of CSD practices in these countries (for example, Schoenfeld, 1978; Ernst & Ernst, 1979; Guthrie & Parker, 1988). There is however, a paucity of CSD literature on practices in the developing countries. The purpose of this paper is to address this imbalance by examining CSD practices in Malaysian and Singapore companies. Within the CSD literature on developed countries, there is evidence that a positive correlation existed between corporate size and CSD (Trotman, 1979). More recently additional evidence was found concerning the themes, methods, extent of CSD in the annual reports, as well as the relationship between CSD and industry groupings (Guthrie, 1983). In the few studies available on developing countries, Teoh & Thong (1984) and Singh & Ahuja (1983) f ound broadly similar evidence. The data reported in this paper is intended to be purely descriptive. The paper explored the CSD characteristics mentioned above and assessed the