Annual report disclosure in a developing country: The case of the UAE

This paper examines the extent of disclosure in annual reports of 31 listed firms in the UAE for the fiscal year 2003, and seeks to determine the underlying factors that affect the level of disclosures. It also seeks to establish whether differences exist between the UAE sectors. This paper uses denominator-adjusted disclosure-indices. The extent of corporate disclosure is calculated and compared among firms and between sectors. Statistical analysis is performed using a logit regression through the implementation of Weighted Least Square and a weighted one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) is employed to determine whether any differences exist in the extent of disclosure among the sample. This study hypothesizes that four main factors would affect the extent of disclosure in the UAE, namely, the sector type (banks, insurance, industrial, and service), size (assets), debt equity ratio, and profitability. Significant differences are found among sectors; however, the size, the debt equity ratio, and the profitability were found to have insignificant association with the level of disclosure.