Organization Visibility and Firm Ownership: Association with Sustainable Development Goals Reporting

The private sector is one of the parties contributing to the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Companies' contributions to SDGs can be examined through their SDGs reporting (SDGR). Based on legitimacy theory, our study investigates whether organization visibility, family ownership, and foreign ownership are associated with SDGR. This study analyzes SDGR in the sustainability report published by listed firms in ASEAN emerging countries. Total observations are 377 firm-year observations from the year 2015 to 2018. We use regression analysis to test our hypothesis. We find that family ownership has a negative association with SDGR, whereas foreign ownership has a positive association with SDGR. However, we find no evidence of organization visibility having played a significant role in SDGR in the sustainability report. We rarely find extant studies that examined the effect of visibility, family ownership, and foreign ownership on SDGR in emerging countries in the ASEAN region.