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The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which the environmental disclosures in annual reports of companies listed on the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange are associated with corporate characteristics.

A rating system for environmental disclosures was developed, based on a review of previous studies, embracing industry membership, financial performance, share price fluctuations, political cost proxies, dependence on debt and the capital market.

The findings suggested that environmental disclosure is negatively associated with company financial performance. A significant inverse relationship between disclosure score and return on assets is apparent, suggesting that environmental disclosure in Malaysia has different priorities from disclosures elsewhere.

This study is the first of its kind to be conducted in Malaysia, and its empirical findings complement the expectations of prior studies.

Asian Review of Accounting (ARA), a leading journal in the field of accounting, completed its 29 years of active publishing in the year 2019. The primary objective of this study is to provide a comprehensive overview of the journal's publishing activities over these years.

The authors use the bibliometric analysis and graphical visualization of bibliographic data to ascertain the publication pattern of ARA. Annual publication and citation structure, leading trends in authorship, institutional affiliation, country affiliation, most cited papers in ARA, documents most cited by ARA and frequency of keyword occurrence are also studied to provide a comprehensive overview of the journal between 1992 and 2019.

Major findings show that ARA has a progressive trend, in terms of both productivity and stature. The journal is highly influenced by Australia and Malaysia in respect of productivity. Major themes published include auditing, financial accounting, governmental and nonprofit accounting, corporate social responsibility, accounting education and financial reporting.

This study offers the first of its kind comprehensive summary of the research work published in ARA.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of environmental disclosure on firm efficiency of the listed firms in Pakistan.

The study uses secondary sources such as sustainability reports, annual reports and company websites to collect the data. A sample of 46 large firms is selected based on market capitalization and listing on the KSE-100 index.

The results suggest that environmental disclosure plays a significant positive role in determining the efficiency of the listed firms. The robustness test also confirms these results.

The study suggests that regulators should take appropriate steps for better and increase the firm's environmental disclosure. The number of sample firms restricts the generalization of results from this study. However, the results are consistent and can be validated using a large sample.

The study includes implications to develop strict guidelines on environmental disclosure in response to its positive effect on the efficiency of the firm.

The study contributes to the growing environmental and efficiency literature by providing empirical evidence from a developing country where there are no strict guidelines on environmental regulations. This study is one of the first to capture environmental disclosure and measure efficiency by employing the data envelopment analysis (DEA) method in developing markets.

Given the rising global interest in the environmental, social and governance (ESG) index, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of social and ethical practices on the firm’s environmental disclosure level.

To test the study’s hypotheses, the authors applied linear regressions with a data panel using the Thomson Reuters ASSET4 and Bloomberg database from seven countries in analyzing data of 523 listed companies selected from the ESG index between 2005 and 2017. Similarly, as an extension of the research and to address the potential unobserved heterogeneity and the dynamic endogeneity, the authors exploited the dynamic dimension of the data set through the generalized moment method (GMM) and estimated the impact of the one-year lagged value of the environmental disclosure.

The empirical results indicate a growing interest in corporate social responsibility (CSR) and ethical practices over the past decade. Besides, companies with a strong social and ethical commitment obtain significantly higher environmental disclosure scores. The results found with the GMM technique indicate the existence of dependence and continuity in environmental disclosure over time.

The research enables the information user to assess the transparency of the company as well as the quality of the information disclosed on its environment and its future growth opportunities in a context where the approach of business ethics occupies a central position in business valuation. The reached results suggest that the institutional and/or cultural factors affect top management’s environmental reporting behavior regarding the quality of published information.

This paper explores, for the first time, the effect of the social and ethical practices of ESG companies with seven different nationalities as well as its dynamic effect on the adoption of an environmental transparency strategy.