Corporate environmental reporting practices in Finland : a review and agenda for future research

Abstract

The research in the area of corporate environmental accounting and reporting in the context of Finland is scarce. This paper outlines the studies conducted to date on Finnish firms’ environmental reporting practices with a view to discovering research gaps in the literature concerning environmental accounting and reporting in the Finnish context. The paper adds to the existing literature by identifying research gaps such as the antiquity of datasets used in the previous studies, the risk of failure to generalize the findings of the prior investigations and most importantly the research negligence towards the impact of Finnish firms’ activities and operations on climate change and changes in biodiversity. Hence, the paper has implications for researchers, who could address the identified void in future research and thereby advance further the literature concerned with environmental accounting and reporting. Policy makers could also benefit from this paper as its findings could help them formulate necessary disclosure requirements for the improvement of corporate environmental reporting practices in Finland. This paper focused only on the studies on Finnish firms and thereby limited the scope for any comparison between Finland and other Nordic countries as far as research on environmental reporting practices is concerned; this is the principal limitation of this study.