Voluntary sustainability reporting and financial performance: Evidence from Global Reporting Initiative disclosures in the developing economy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Considering the growing interest in sustainability reporting and the benefits of sustainability initiatives to developing countries (Ali, Frynas, & Mahmood, 2017), the scarcity of studies on sustainability in developing climes is surprising. This study examines the trend of voluntary sustainability reporting in Africa and the relationship between sustainability disclosures and firms’ financial performance. This paper measures sustainability disclosures using content analysis of the Global Reporting Initiative Guidelines (GRI G4) for total disclosure and the sub-categories of economic, environmental, and social disclosures. Financial performance measures are return on assets (ROA) and return on equity (ROE). Results of the multiple comparison of means do not show any significant improvement in sustainability reporting over the study period. Results of the multiple regression analysis, however, reveal a positive relationship between measures of sustainability disclosures and both ROA and ROE. Additional results show that disclosing firms do not generally have their sustainability reports assured and are from countries with poor sustainability performance. These findings contribute to the literature in reconciling the mixed results from prior studies (Aggarwal, 2013; Al Hawaj & Buallay, 2022) and are useful to the GRI organization in making improvements to their reporting guidelines, particularly as to how the improvements touch African countries.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.089 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".