INTRODUCTION:

Different legislations were made global, national and at regional levels. The enormous growth of population, economic development, gave ways for many environmental problems. The uncontrolled urbanization, industrialization, intensive agriculture destruction of forest cover is common among them. This kind of environment degradation is resulting to cyclones, floods, acid rains, reversal of seasonal pattern, drought etc there by transforming natural environment.

Accountant role is evolving now a days, earlier accountant used to provide only financial information to stakeholders of the company but now a days Accountant role has completely changed now, he has to provide the financial information as well as other information which is required to stakeholders like environmental accounting information also. as stakeholders are much aware about environmental activities now a day’s companies need to disclose environmental information also in their annual reports but in India the environmental reporting is in infancy stage and environmental disclosure by companies are very nominal.

Though there are number of studies covering on environmental accounting and disclosure practices but in depth studies related to the influence or impact of ownership structure on environmental accounting and disclosure practices are not covered exclusively, by identifying this gap . I have initiated my study whether ownership structure really differentiate in disclosing environmental information by the companies or not.

LITERATURE REVIEW:

(Akrout & Othman, 2016) Examined the association of ownership structure with environmental accounting and disclosure practices in MENA Countries. The study revealed that there is a negative association between family ownership structure and environmental accounting and disclosure practices and also found that government ownership improved the environmental accounting and disclosure practices.

(Matta, 2017) analyzed the relationship between ownership structure and corporate environmental accounting and disclosure in India. the study revealed that environmental disclosure practices positively associated with the government ownership and institutional ownership.

(Makhija & Patton, 2004) examined the Czech annual reports to know the impact of ownership on voluntary disclosure. The study revealed that ownership structure is a significant determinant for overall disclosure.

(Mgammal, 2017) Examined the impact of ownership structure on voluntary disclosure practices in Saudi Arabia. the study found that government ownership structure positively influenced the voluntary disclosure practices.

(Khan, Chand, & Patel, 2013) Examined the impact of ownership structure on voluntary disclosure practices in pacific island countries. the study found that less voluntary disclosure in family owned business and high voluntary disclosure in high shareholder concentrated organizations.

(Omnamasivya and Prasad 2016) analyzed the factors influencing the environmental accounting and disclosure practices in India. The study found that government ownership positively influenced the environmental accounting and disclosure practices.

METHODOLOGY OF THE STUDY:

The study is based on secondary data. sample size selected for this study is NIFTY companies and annual reports of NIFTY for the 2020 year had collected, the main reason to select NIFTY companies is NIFTY Covers the different industries. ANNOVA and Multiple range tests have been applied to analyze the data and for measuring the environmental accounting and disclosure practices an Environmental Reporting Index is computed by using the below formula.

The weighted mean disclosure has been calculated with the following formula based on 0-5 rating scale to calculate the extent of ERI

Where, j represents the number of companies (50 companies in the sample);

d_ij = 0; if the item has not been disclosed;

d_ij = 1; if only one or less than one sentence has been disclosed;

d_ij = 2; if the more than one sentence have been disclosed;

d_ij = 3; Only one quantitative figure is found;

d_ij = 4; if the disclosure is Non- Monetary and comprises more than one figure;

d_ij = 5; if the disclosure is expressed in money terms

Hypothesis Testing:

H₀₁: There is no statistically significant difference between the Environment Disclosure score over two forms of ownership.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS:

Table 1: Summary Statistics for Weighted ERI scores for 2020

	Ownership = private	Ownership = public
Count	40	10
Average	4.6264	5.48780
Standard deviation	4.15240	4.58107
Coeff. of variation	54.73%	50.90%
Minimum	0	0

The table 1 shows the mean ERI disclosures for public and private sector. The mean disclosure of environmental disclosure in case of private sector is 4.6264. This is less than the environmental disclosures by public sector companies which have mean disclosure score of 5.4870. The variability is slightly more in case of private sector enterprises than public sector companies. The variability is more in case of public limited companies implying that public companies make less consistent disclosures of energy than private sector companies.

Investigation into significant of variations in ERI across two forms of ownership:

In order to investigate whether significant differences exist in the overall Environment Reporting across public and private sectors, the Levene’s test for equality of variance and independent samples t- test has been conducted as per below table.

Table 2: Comparison of Standard Deviations for Weighted ERI scores for 2020

	Private	Public
Standard deviation	4.152402	4.581067
Variance	28.2776	34.4173
Df	39	9

Ratio of Variances = 0.82161006

95.0% Confidence Intervals

Standard deviation of Ownership=private: [4.152402, 3.65841]

Standard deviation of Ownership=public: [4.581067, 8.64591]

Ratio of Variances: [0.65463, 1.654638]

F-test to Compare Standard Deviations

Null hypothesis: sigma1 = sigma2

Alt. hypothesis: sigma1 NE sigma2

F = 0.354268 P-value = 0.466865

Do not reject the null hypothesis for alpha = 0.05.

This analysis shows the results of performing Levene’s test of equality of variances. Since the P-value for the Levene’s test is greater than 0.05 (F = 0.354268 and P-value = 0.466865), in case of weighted ERI disclosures, so the null hypothesis proposing equality of variance cannot be rejected at the 95.0% confidence level. Further, the t-test statistics corresponding to equality of variances have to be considered.

Comparison of Means for Weighted ERI scores for the year 2020.

95.0% confidence interval for mean of

Ownership=private: 4.6264 +/- 1.71507 [6.6542, 10.63842]

95.0% confidence interval for mean of Ownership=public: 5.48780 +/- 3.62113 [6.4235, 13.46342]

95.0% confidence interval for the difference between the means, assuming equal variances: -1.4127 +/- 3.63269 [-6.46282, 2.65432

T test to compare means

Null hypothesis: mean ERI for private companies = mean ERI for public companies

Alt. hypothesis: mean1 NE mean2

Assuming equal variances: t = -0.485295 P-value =0.46846

Do not reject the null hypothesis for alpha = 0.05.

This analysis shows the results of performing a t- test concerning the difference between the means of ERI disclosures scores of public and private samples. Given one sample of 40 observations and a second sample of 10 observations, the computed t statistics have been calculated. Since the P-value for the t- test is greater than 0.05 in case of ERI disclosures, the null hypothesis cannot be rejected at the 95.0% confidence level. This signifies that there is no difference between means disclosure scores of public and private sectors. In the present study, the data is found to be skewed indicating significant non-normality in the data, which violates the assumption that the data come from normal distributions. So, the Kruskal-Wallis test and Mood's Median test to compare the medians in addition to mean has been considered desirable along with the ANOVA to give the final interpretation on significance of difference in ERI score over the public and private sectors.

Comparison of Medians for Weighted ERI scores for 2020:

Median of sample 1(Private companies): 6.0

Median of sample 2 (Public companies): 7.0

Mann-Whitney (Wilcoxon) W test to compare medians

Null hypothesis: median1 = median2

Alt. hypothesis: median1 NE median2

Average rank of sample 1: 40.627 and Average rank of Public companies is found to be 45.46824 and test statistics of Mann-Whitney (Wilcoxon) W is 55.0 with P-value = 0.46284, so null hypothesis is not rejected for alpha = 0.05. This confirms the earlier finding of no differences in means. So no significance difference is found between the mean Weighted ERI score of public and private sectors for the year 2020.

CONCLUSION:

The rapid increase in economic activities in the world, more specifically the manufacturing firms use various natural resources for different kinds of manufacturing process. at the same time these manufacturing activities are accountable for pollution of environment, early times these manufacturing units have ignored the various waste treatment measures and regulatory norms stipulated by government were not followed this resulted in various types of pollution like soil, water, sound, air. Different legislations were made global, national and at regional levels. the main aim of the study is to know the whether ownership structure really influence the environmental accounting and disclosure practices or not. NIFTY has taken as a sample size for the study and in order to test the hypothesis various statistical tools like Annova, Levens Test and T test have been applied. The study found that there is no statistically significant difference between the environmental disclosure over two forms of ownership. Environmental accounting and disclosure practices is in infancy stage and purely on voluntary basis. There is no compulsion for disclosing the environmental information by either the public ownership structure companies and private ownership structure companies.

REFERENCES:

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Received on 30.01.2021 Modified on 19.02.2021

Asian Journal of Management. 2021; 12(3):317-320.

DOI: 10.52711/2321-5763.2021.00048

Is Ownership structure really Influence Environmental Accounting and Disclosure Practices

Comparison of Medians for Weighted ERI scores for 2020: