Corporate sustainability practices and reporting: A case of Malaysian real estate investment trusts and property listed companies

This paper investigated the quality of reporting regarding different dimensions (economic, environmental, social) of corporate sustainability (CS) in Malaysia. The paper examined the quality of CS disclosure on the basis of global reporting initiative in a sample of 113 listed companies from real estate investment trusts and property sectors for 4 years i.e., from 2010 to 2013. The data collected from websites and annual reports of these companies exhibit variations in quality and disclosure of different CS dimensions. The paper found that environmental dimension was less while social dimension was a highly focused aspect of CS. Moreover, most of the companies report sustainability for the sake of mere compliance to the relevant regulations. This paper is unique in terms to focus all the dimensions of CS as most of the previous literature addressed these separately. Moreover, being a first comprehensive study, particularly after 10^th Malaysian Plan (2011-2015), the paper has important findings for regulators, academia, researchers and other stakeholders.