Digital Commons Network^™

The Readability Of Sustainability Reporting In New Zealand Over Time, Azadeh Nilipour, Tracy-Anne De Silva, Xuedong Li

Australasian Accounting, Business and Finance Journal

This paper examines the readability of sustainability reporting in the annual reports, and stand-alone reports of New Zealand listed companies over a ten-year period. Sustainability reporting was manually extracted from 264 reports, and readability software was used to identify the readability scores using five readability indices. Additionally, the effects of reporting quantity, environmental sensitivity, and global listing on the readability of sustainability reporting were examined.

The results show that over the ten-year period readability has improved by only 6.5 per cent, despite a substantial increase in the number of companies reporting sustainability information, and an increase in the quantity of …