Accounting for Sustainability in Asia: Stock Market Regulation and Reporting in Hong Kong and Singapore

abstractSustainability reporting nudges firms into behaving more sustainably by forcing them to account publicly for their wider social and environmental performance. This libertarian paternalist approach to governance through disclosure rather than command-and-control regulation is well established in Anglo-Saxon jurisdictions but comparatively untested in the emerging markets of Asia, where different state traditions and forms of business organization raise questions about its transferability and effectiveness. This article contributes to research on corporate social responsibility, neoliberal environmental governance, and Asian varieties of capitalism by providing the first comparative analysis of the origins, design, and initial impact of new sustainability reporting requirements on the stock markets of Hong Kong and Singapore. In mandating sustainability reporting, both exchanges were similarly concerned with following international norms and competitors but differed in the style and granularity of t...