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The purpose of this paper is to identify the structure of local government environmental expenditures by purpose, term and economic type, as well as the sources of their financing.

Research and data analysis were carried out on the basis of relevant sources of data gathered from the publicly available decisions on annual statements of accounts for 2011, published on local governments’ internet pages.

The main domains of expenditures are pollution abatement, waste and wastewater management and protection of biodiversity. The most of expenditure relates to operating expenses, while only a few percent relates to long-term investments. The most of environmental protection expenditures are financed from the local government organization's (LGO) general budget.

In the field of environmental protection, the most significant direct responsibility lies with local governments. On the other hand, information on the structure of environmental protection income and expenditures at the local government level is very limited and highly defragmented. The study may represent a starting point for further research in this field.

The methodology and the results reported in this research could be used for exploring environmental policy of LGOs in other European countries.

The paper aims to review the concept of the environmental protection expenditure account (EPEA). It recommends its application in the decision‐making process in the area of environmental management.

The review of the environmental protection expenditure account is based on surveys conducted in several old and new European Union member nations.

The EPEA elements, i.e. production of environmental services, environmental protection expenditure and financing of environmental protection, have been presented in certain EU countries but results of the analyses were not used for the assessment or elaboration of environmental policy.

This paper presents several examples of the application of the environmental protection expenditure account in the environmental management process and in sustainable development.

The proposal of the EPEA application can be used by general administration for the improvement of environmental management activities.

Corporate environmental expenditure has been a growing concern in recent years, yet mixed findings exist regarding its economic impact. The purpose of this paper is to explain the mixed relationship between environmental expenditure and economic performance from the natural-resource-based view.

Using Global Reporting Initiative survey data from 120 firms in 30 countries, this study uses PROCESS, a path-based analysis software, to test the moderation and mediation hypotheses in an integrated analytical model.

The findings show that environmental expenditure has a negative impact on economic performance through pollution prevention capability. In contrast, environmental expenditure has a positive impact on economic performance through product stewardship capability. Both effects are significantly strengthened when the firm is located in an environmentally munificent country.

This study intends to inform firm managers, especially those in environmentally munificent countries, to relocate their environmental expenditure to enhance firms’ economic performance. In particular, firms should focus more on the reduction of input, such as raw materials, energy, and water, instead of output, including emissions, effluents, and wastes.

The contrasting indirect effects of pollution prevention and product stewardship offer a viable explanation for the mixed findings in the existent literature on environmental expenditure from a new perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether managerial ability affects the quality of corporate environmental financial disclosures.

Regression analysis is used to examine the association between managerial ability and the quality of corporate environmental financial disclosures.

The results of primary empirical tests find a negative association between projection errors of corporate environmental capital expenditures and managerial ability. Overall results suggest that (1) managers appear to be equally capable of making relatively accurate projections of total corporate capital expenditures, and (2) managers with higher managerial ability are capable of estimating the projection amounts that appear to be significant, yet do not deviate substantially to what they intend to spend in the subsequent year(s) for legitimation purposes.

The data collected and analyzed include only publicly traded companies in the environmentally sensitive industries in the USA; therefore, the results should not be generalized to non-US listed, private and non-publicly traded businesses.

Results of this study provide practical implications for stakeholders in their decision-making. For instance, understanding how different levels of managerial ability affect corporate environmental disclosures quality assists the board of directors in their evaluations of the performance of current top management. Furthermore, when contemplating new laws, governmental agencies and legislators can consider how managerial ability might affect the likelihood of environmentally sensitive businesses to comply with full disclosure and other reporting requirements.

Information regarding top management’s ability to carry out socially acceptable environmental practices is very valuable for investors who are interested in socially responsible and green investing.

This study contributes to and links between two research streams: managerial ability in management literature and environmental financial disclosure literature. This is the first study that empirically tests whether the managerial ability is a determinant of the quality of corporate environmental financial disclosures.

The purpose of this paper is to examine three potential explanations for the corporate choice to disclose environmental capital spending amounts.

Using archival data from a sample of Fortune 500 US firms operating in industries subject to both the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) TRI program and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's Hazard Communication Standards, the authors conduct quantitative threshold tests to first investigate whether disclosure appears to be a function of the materiality of the spending. Using statistical tests, including multiple regression analyses, the authors next attempt to differentiate the choice to disclose across voluntary disclosure theory and legitimacy theory arguments.

First, the authors find that, for the overwhelming majority of observations, the disclosed amounts are not quantitatively material. This suggests that non‐disclosure is likely due to immateriality. Next, their findings show that disclosing firms do not exhibit improved subsequent environmental performance relative to non‐disclosing companies. Further, controlling for firm size and industry class, they find the choice to disclose is associated with worse environmental performance.

The sample includes only relatively larger firms from certain industries and this limits the generalizability of the findings. Smaller firms and those from excluded industries may have other reasons to choose to disclose environmental information. Further, the authors rely on TRI data to assess pollution performance, but TRI is self‐reported and its reliability is only as good as the inputs. Finally, although environmental capital spending is potentially relevant information, this investigation does not examine other types of environmental information disclosure.

This paper provides corroborating evidence that companies use the disclosure of environmental capital spending as a strategic tool to address their exposures to political and regulatory concerns. Hence, interpreting disclosed environmental information would appear to require careful understanding of the underlying motivations.

This paper extends the environmental accounting and reporting literature by contributing to the unresolved question of what drives differences in the corporate disclosure of environmental information. The authors add to this body of research by investigating the disclosure of one specific piece of environmental information, the amount of capital expenditures incurred for pollution abatement and control.

Voluntary corporate social responsibility reporting has developed into an everyday activity for many commercial organizations, and scholarly interest in these practices continues to increase. This paper focusses on one subset of these disclosures, namely the figures relating to environmental expenditures and investments published by various organizations. The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into the nature, role and significance of such financial environmental information. Despite their seeming accuracy and preciseness, little is known about how such financial environmental information is constructed and subsequently used in organizational settings.

The paper is based on a qualitative case study focussing on a Finnish energy company. The authors build the investigation primarily on 26 semi-structured interviews with employees at all organizational levels, which the authors supplement with various documentary sources. The interpretation draws on the notion of loose coupling, which the authors use as a method theory to provide a better understanding of this complex organizational practice.

The authors highlight the ambiguous and imprecise nature of the outwardly accurate figures provided by the company. The authors argue that disclosed financial environmental information is only loosely coupled with various dimensions, including the organization’s actual activities, its environmental impacts and organizational decision making.

The findings contrast with those of some prior research, which has considered financial environmental information highly valuable. As for broader implications, the paper discusses the accuracy of public records based on such ambiguous organizational figures.

The role of environmental regulations in inducing innovation and improving performance has been studied in the literature. However, there have been no studies in the UK using statistical data. This paper aims to study the links among regulations, innovation and performance in the UK using sector level data.

The paper used structural equation modelling to study the links among the three variables simultaneously.

The analysis indicates that environmental regulations in the UK are significant in improving economic performance of the industrial sectors. They also find that, in the short run, environmental regulations negatively influence innovation, and innovation negatively influences economic performance in these sectors.

The results have implications both for policy makers and firms in the UK industrial sector. For policy makers, environmental regulations have generally improved economic performance. For firms, the study shows that sufficient planning in meeting government's environment standards can help improve their economic performance.

This is the first study in the UK to explore simultaneously the links among the three variables: environmental regulations, innovation, and performance, using secondary sector level data.

This paper aims to explore the relationship between environmental regulation, technological innovation and manufacturing quality competitiveness to provide some references for emission reduction activities and improvements in manufacturing quality competitiveness to achieve environmental protection targets and economic development as part of a win–win situation.

Based on the structure-behavior-performance paradigm and Grabowski’s research, a new empirical model was provided. The software, EViews 6.0, was used for econometric analysis. Regression analysis was adopted to explore the three indicators’ relationships.

First, environmental regulation can promote technological innovation effectively. Second, compared with wasted gas and wasted solids, investment in wasted water control promotes Chinese technological innovation most. Third, the impact of research and development investment, induced by environmental regulation, on manufacturing quality competitiveness is greater than that induced by non-environmental regulation. Fourth, the impact of lagged two-phase environmental regulation on manufacturing quality competitiveness is similar to that of lagged one-phase regulation.

The issue that Chinese manufacturing is facing is how to manage the trade-off between pollution control investment and improved quality competitiveness. This study enables managers to understand how to better implement environmental regulation initiatives while achieving environmental protection and quality competitiveness as part of a win–win situation.

This paper analyzes the relationships between environmental regulation, technological innovation and manufacturing quality competitiveness for the first time and provides the basic argument for integrating Chinese environmental regulation with quality competitiveness to reveal the uniqueness of the circumstances determining China’s economic development.

This paper is based on empirical data of the IIUG project “Environment and the National Accounts”. A more extensive and detailed report on this project was recently published by Andreas Ryll and Sabine Wadewitz: “Zur Volkswirtschaftlichen Gesamtrechnung des monetären Umweltschutzes 1975–1985”, IIUG rep 87–8, 178 pp.

To protect against the increasing environmental degradation many agents choose today to replace consumption of depleted environmental goods with that of privately produced substitute goods. The present paper aims to highlight how this “self‐protective” behaviour that is increasingly frequent in modern societies may affect the welfare of the individuals.

The paper presents a combination of narrative with argument and analysis. It first provides several examples of self‐protective choices to give a heuristic view of this phenomenon and then examines their effects through a simple evolutionary model that leads the reader beyond a purely intuitive understanding of the substitution mechanism described in the first part.

The paper shows that replacing environmental goods with artificial substitute goods may give rise to an “undesiderable growth” process, that is, a vicious circle between environmental degradation and private consumption which contributes to economic growth but may have negative effects on the welfare of the agents.

The paper investigates an aspect of the link between environmental degradation and economic growth that has been mainly ignored in the literature so far. While most contributions have underlined that self‐protective choices can boost economic growth, the paper goes one step forward and shows that they can actually give rise to a self‐reinforcing growth process in which environmental degradation increases economic growth and viceversa, leading the economy on a welfare‐reducing path.