Integrated Reporting and European State-Owned Enterprises: A Disclosure Analysis Pre and Post 2014/95/EU

The European Directive 2014/95/EU regulating the disclosure of non-financial information for public interest organisations is enjoying its first years since entering into force in 2017. The emerging of social, environmental and sustainability issues in combination with the New Public Management (NPM) reforms, led public sector entities to huge demands of accountability. Long time before the European Union Directive (EUD) on non-financial information, public sector entities were pushed to demonstrate to a broad range of stakeholders how public resources are used. Accordingly, the stakeholders’ increasing demand for social and environmental information has encouraged the adoption of different types of reports by organisations, such as the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Report, Sustainability Reporting (SR) and the Integrated Report (IR).In the context of State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs), the disclosure of non-financial information gains a pivotal relevance as these type of organisations face a more comprehensive range of stakeholders than private organisations. In this vein, the present paper aims to investigate whether the mandatory disclosure directive increased the level of information provided by SOEs issuing an IR between the years 2016 and 2017 in order to demonstrate whether a mandatory regulation leads to higher disclosure.