An assessment of Information disclosures by Pharmaceutical Industry: Evidence from India

Abstract

The information disclosed by the companies in their annual reports reveals much about company’s performance and prospects. Investors take the information as base for decision for investment. Under such circumstance, companies choose to disclose beyond what is mandatorily required. Theories like agency theory, capital need theory and signaling theory support the need of voluntary disclosure. This study is about investigating the extent of Voluntary disclosure in pharmaceutical sector of India which is 3rd in World in terms of Volume of Trade.Objective: To investigate the extent of voluntary disclosure practices prevailing in pharma sector of India, for the year 2010-11 to 2017-18.Significance of the study: This study aims to explore the corporate aspect of pharmaceutical sector. Any growing avenue is a potential opportunity for investors looking for parking their money to get adequate returns. Thus, Indian Pharma sector has come up in flying colors as an avenue for investors to place their money owing to its 100% FDI . Investors have been looking for more and more information from this sector to ensure the safety of funds. Thus the extent of disclosures is worth studying to place a suggestion for the policymakers to introduce the changes in the present set of disclosure practices in pharmaceutical sector.Research Methodology: To understand the extent of voluntary disclosure, a disclosure checklist is constructed and descriptive statistics are carved out to reach the results. The checklist consists of 55 items which are not mandatory by law. The checklist is based on dichotomous scale of ‘1’ and ‘0’ representing presence and absence of the checklist item respectively. The cross sectional analysis is carried out to investigate the year wise and company wise disclosure for eight years.Findings: Though the study observes an increasing trends in the disclosure scores, but the findings are alarming to state that the highest score attained by any company throughout the period of 8 years was 37 (out of 55) not even meeting 80% of the total checklist score. This shows that pharmaceutical sector is not so friendly at disclosures. The probable reasons for such startling results are discussed in the study.