Page 47 - CITN 2017 Journal

Figure 1: environmental performance score trend

From figure 1, the trend for the sampled group could signify that the prevailing
environmental legislation over the period has placed these companies in the lime light and
they are aware of the need to maintain high environmental performance standards. It is
obvious companies are more cognizant with the way that environmental legislation creates
environmental cost and concerns for the operation and activities of the organisation.
However, the analysis of Holland and Foo (2003) of environmental regulation in the UK
still found that disclosure is propelled by management; therefore an active environmental
performance strategy will not lead to comparability or reliability of environmental
performance information among companies and industries. Campbell (2004) states that
Cross-sectional effects will be observable with those companies or sectors more likely to
be affected by environmental performance category disclosing more information relevant
to the area of concern than those less affected.

Table 2: Frequency distribution of mean environmental performance score
Labels 0-29 30-39 40-49 50-59 60-69 70-79 80-89 90-99 Total
Companies 2 2 2 7 10 14 31 26 94
Source: Author's Computation, 2015

Table 2 shows that most of the FTSE 100 companies in the sample are good environmental
performers, 84% of the companies have environmental performance score of above 60.
The fact that the companies in the sample are a part of an elite group on the London Stock
exchange creates greater media visibility which would explain their willingness to disclose
more about their environmental performance. The cost/benefits framework of
environmental performance and disclosure already predicts that firms that pursue such
proactive environmental strategy have more to gain; these firms evidently possess greater
capabilities and resources which appear to be the case for most of the companies in the
sample. From our results, low polluting firms in the financial and customer service
industry are among the lowest environmental performers, this maybe because they have
less incentives to be environmentally proactive. Among the top environmental performers
are companies in the technology, telecommunications, mining, customer service,
customer good, utilities, health care and industrial sectors.

Descriptive statistics and correlations
The descriptive statistics is useful in understanding the particular characteristics of the
each variable in the panel data. Over 470 observations the mean, standard deviation,
minimum and maximum values of the variables share market Price, book value per share
(BVS), Earnings per share (EPS) and Environmental performance score (ENVS) are

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