Determinants of Sustainability Disclosure: Empirical Evidence from Vietnam

The paper investigates the effect of the factors on the disclosure of sustainable development information of enterprises. The research sample includes 120 manufacturing companies listed on Vietnam stock market in 2019. This research uses ordinary least squares (OLS) to address econometric issues and to improve the accuracy of the regression coefficients. The empirical results show that five variables have a statistically significant positive effect on disclosure of sustainable development information of manufacturing companies, including firm size (SIZE), independence of board of directors (BOD), foreign ownership (FRO), return on equity (ROE), and financial leverage (LEV). The results indicate that state ownership (STO) has a statistically significant negative effect on disclosure of sustainable development information of manufacturing companies listed on Vietnam stock market. Besides, the research results also show there is a large difference in the disclosure of sustainable development information between listed companies in Vietnam, those of other emerging economies in the region, and the companies in developed markets. Therefore, this paper provides a new insight to managers and related parties on how to improve the firm's sustainability disclosure to bring benefit for the firm itself and the stakeholders by reasonable decisions about the factors that affect disclosure of sustainable development information.