Integrated Reporting and the Value Relevance of Non-Financial information: Empirical evidence from South Africa

This paper investigates the value relevance of non-financial information disclosed in a new model of business reporting, called Integrated Reporting (IR) through evidence from a developing country, South Africa. The present research aims to assess the convergence of three different frameworks (listed below) in relation to the issue of the non-financial reporting through the analysis of the integrated reports issued by listed companies on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange: 1) Global Reporting Initiative, GRI non-paper May 2013, and G4 2013; 2) IIRC, International <IR> Framework December 2013; 3) King III; Institute of Directors in Southern Africa. The objectives of the research are: 1) to assess whether the adoption of Integrated Reporting could enhance the disclosure of NFI; 2) to evaluate the impact of the disclosure of non-financial information on the financial markets. The methodological approach is based on two different fields: 1) the content analysis in order to evaluate the quantity and the quality of non-financial information and 2) established valuation models. The empirical analysis focuses on annual reports (2009) and on integrated reports (2013). The analysis sets and tests empirically two hypotheses in order to understand the role of IR to mitigate the information asymmetry, to attract long-term investment from outside investors and to improve the firms ‟signal”, and then increase firms’ value. The hypotheses are appropriately processed using statistical methods. The empirical findings show the following considerations:1) non-financial information disclosure within Integrated Reporting is not value relevant for a company’s market value; 2) the differences in the level of compliance regards to non-financial information disclosure between 2009 and 2013 is statistically significant. The findings can be used by policy makers in order to develop or modify the regulatory frameworks on non-financial information reporting and to encourage the use and harmonisation of existing reporting guidelines to increase comparability.