University of Southampton

Social and Environmental Accounting in Germany: Companies' reporting practices vs. Information requirements of individual shareholders

The survey to be undertaken will be one part of a MSc dissertation. The aim of this dissertation is to compare the reporting practices of German companies in terms of Social and Environmental Accounting Information to the information requirements of one of the user groups of their annual reports: individual shareholders.

The "German" reporting profile will be established by sampling a number of companies from the German DAX index and then analysing their corresponding annual against a framework defined at the beginning of the paper. This profile will then be compared to the results of the survey which is supposed to give some insights into the way individual German shareholders think about Social and Environmental Accounting information, i.e. their information requirements and the impact of corresponding information on their decisions regarding the investment.