Non-Financial Information Disclosures and Environmental Protection—Evidence from Romania and Greece

Abstract

Currently, sustainability and sustainable development are issues that concern society due to the high degree of pollution and the measures taken that, in many cases, do not prove their efficiency. Economic entities are aware that their involvement in the community has become necessary for the sustainable development of any business. The promotion of responsibility towards the environment is an important principle of corporate social responsibility (CSR), which is becoming an obligation that can no longer be exempted. Our intention in this paper was to study the changes generated by the European Union (EU) Directive 2014/95 regarding the manner in which oil entities listed at the Bucharest Stock Exchange (BSE) and the Athens Stock Exchange (ATHEX) between 2014 and 2018, report environment-related information. We also identified whether entities in fields that are known as polluting were more sensitive to environmental factors and if they tended to report more information compared to other business sectors. To achieve these objectives, we used qualitative and quantitative research. Namely, we analyzed the entities’ non-financial reports, to identify their social responsibility actions, and we tested if they were correlated with the environment protection and also with the 2014/95 European directive stipulations. For the entities operating in this polluting area, demonstrating transparency regarding the efforts and investments made to counteract the environmental impacts is important. Non-financial corporate reporting can be an opportunity to integrate sustainability into a company’s business practices and strategies to obtain benefits and to increase efficiency and, thus, to increase stakeholder confidence. The contribution of our study is to highlight the importance of non-financial information for the sustainable development of companies and the environment.