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The aim of this research is to examine the relationship between corporate governance variables (i.e. audit committee independence, foreign ownership, foreign directors, and director independency) and corporate social and responsibility (CSR) disclosures in ASEAN. The increasing stakeholders’ needs of corporate accountability demand corporations to practice good corporate governance and corporate CSR disclosures. Many research have been conducted to examine the correlation between corporate governance and corporate CSR disclosures. However, that research only focuses on individual country characteristic. With ASEAN integration has been implemented, this research is also meant to test the generalizability of previous research to regional context of ASEAN. With ASEAN corporations operate in unique and diverse characteristics, the relationship between corporate governance variables and corporate practice of CSR disclosures unclear.

The sample of this research is corporations listed in FTSE 49 ASEAN Value Stock Index. Both the annual reports and/or CSR reports of those corporations are examined. In examining how corporate governance variables affect CSR disclosures, STATA 14 is utilized. This research finds that, together, corporate governance variables affect corporate practice of CSR disclosures in ASEAN. In countries which CSR disclosures are mandatory, only foreign ownership positively affects CSR disclosures. Whereas, for countries that implement voluntary disclosures, only some control variables (i.e. return on asset, age of corporation, corporate size) that individually affects CSR disclosures, and not the individual independent variables.

corporate governance; CSR disclosures; voluntary CSR disclosures; mandatory CSR disclosures