Environmental Reporting Practices of Malaysian Government Linked Companies (GLCs)

The main objective of the study is to examine the extent Malaysian government-linked companies GLCs) report on the environment. The government has strongly emphasised social and nvironmental responsibility amongst GLCs through the introduction of the ‘Silver Book’ and other green” initiatives. Given this and the fact that GLCs are affiliated to the government and clearly visible”, the primary concern is their “accountability” to the people. More importantly, the extent hese GLCs promote sustainable development and accord with the government’s vision is indeed a opic worthy of study. The results show that albeit the “visibility” and “accountability” aspects ttached to GLCs, the level of environmental disclosure was rather low. Additionally, almost 30 ercent of the companies did not report on the environment. In the matched-pair analysis (matching ith the non-GLCs), the study found that there is no statistical difference in the level of nvironmental disclosure of GLCs and non-GLCs in environmentally sensitive industries. Further, the tudy found no significant difference in the level of environmental disclosure between GLCs in nvironmentally sensitive industries and less sensitive industries. The nature of the disclosure was lso consistent between both categories of industries where most of the environmental information isclosed was in the declarative form