Moving from voluntary to mandatory sustainability reporting—Transparency in sustainable development goals (SDG) reporting: An analysis of Germany's largest MNCs

Abstract

A growing number of multinational companies (MNCs) report on their progress toward contributing to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in their annual reports, yet the amount and quality of the information they disclose varies significantly. The aim of this study is twofold: First, we investigate how transparent MNCs report on their SDG engagement and second, we study how the reported SDG engagement changed over time due to major shifts in sustainability reporting requirements. Using a dataset of the largest German MNCs, we analyze their disclosure of SDG contribution reporting practices. Our results show that, overall, between 2016 and 2021 all German MNCs increased their SDG reporting activity and that the MNCs adopted four different practices to report their SDG engagement. We also found that the largest MNCs were more transparent and systematic in their SDG reporting than smaller MNCs, whose reporting was more heterogeneous. Our study contributes to legitimacy research and the role of transparency in corporate reporting as well as the debates on the efficacy of sustainability reporting legislation in the context of SDG engagement. Our findings imply that regulations on environmental and social regulation increase the transparency of sustainability reporting.