Volutary disclosure of environmental, economic and social information on agricultural cooperatives

Abstract

This article aims to determinate and to compare the level of voluntary disclosure in financial statements of agricultural cooperatives and companies of the agricultural segment. For these, we have analyzed the financial statements of the year ended in 2008. This study is classified as empirical and descriptive. On the other hand, the problem´s approach is predominantly quantitative. For data analysis we used a metric for the content analysis and were developed three indices: i) level of compliance to the voluntary disclosure of companies; ii) the disclosure level of firms that practice voluntary disclosure; iii) the general level of voluntary disclosure. We concluded that cooperatives have higher level of voluntary disclosure of environmental and social information. On the other hand, listed companies have a higher level of voluntary disclosure of economic information. The conclusions confirmed the three hypotheses previously stated. It is worth mentioning that the results can not be generalized because they are restricted to a sample of a specific sector and based of the financial statements of one accounting period.