Proceedings of Annual Paris Business Research Conference
13 - 14 August 2015, Crowne Plaza Hotel Republique, Paris, France
ISBN: 978-1-922069-82-5
Factors Influencing the Extent of Corporate Compliance
with IFRS: The Case of Kuwaiti Listed Companies
Issa DawdA, Bruce BurtonB, and Theresa DunneC
The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent of disclosure in annual reports
of Kuwaiti non-financial listed firms. Kuwait is of interest because of the remarkable
growth in stock exchange activity and the unique business environment in Kuwait.
In addition, as Kuwait was one of the first developing countries to adopt IAS (in
1991) it represents a useful site for analysis. Two main methods were used:
disclosure indices of mandatory, voluntary and aggregate (mandatory and
voluntary) disclosure; and multiple regression analysis of determinants of the
aggregate, mandatory, and voluntary disclosure levels. The results show that the
aggregate level of disclosure is 44% and mandatory and voluntary disclosure is
58.8% and 18% respectively. The multivariate regression results reveal that large
companies disclose more information than small companies, but only in terms of
voluntary disclosure. More profitable companies disclose less mandatory
information than companies with lower income, while leverage, liquidity, listing age
and audit type have no significant association with aggregate, mandatory, and
voluntary disclosure. The results of the study are likely to have implications for
decision makers, the academic community and accounting standard setters.
Keywords: voluntary disclosure; mandatory disclosure; Kuwait; disclosure index,
multivariate analysis.
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A: College of Business and Economics, Qatar University, Qatar, Email: idawd@qu.edu.qa
B and C: School of Business, University of Dundee, Dundee, UK