Analysis of corporate environmental reports using statistical techniques and data mining
This work addresses the problem of evaluating qualitative environmental reports for corporations and regulators, but it is incremental as it applies existing statistical methods to a specific dataset.
The study tackled the challenge of measuring and comparing corporate environmental reports by applying data mining and statistical techniques to 539 reports, finding significant differences across industries and identifying key factors like stakeholder and organizational strategy.
Measuring the effectiveness of corporate environmental reports, it being highly qualitative and less regulated, is often considered as a daunting task. The task becomes more complex if comparisons are to be performed. This study is undertaken to overcome the physical verification problems by implementing data mining technique. It further explores on the effectiveness by performing exploratory analysis and structural equation model to bring out the significant linkages between the selected 10 variables. Samples of five hundred and thirty nine reports across various countries are used from an international directory to perform the statistical analysis like: One way ANOVA (Analysis of Variance), MDA (Multivariate Discriminant Analysis) and SEM (Structural Equation Modeling). The results indicate the significant differences among the various types of industries in their environmental reporting, and the exploratory factors like stakeholder, organization strategy and industrial oriented factors, proved significant. The major accomplishment is that the findings correlate with the conceptual frame work of GRI.