The Extent of Voluntary Disclosure in an Emerging Capital Market : The Case of Jordan

This study evaluates the extent of voluntary disclosure in the annual reports of non-financial companies listed at the Amman Stock Exchange (ASE) for the year 2006. The study adopts the disclosure index suggested by Haddad et al. (2009) and evaluates the voluntary disclosure for the Jordanian companies for the year 2006 at three levels: the first provides a description and analysis of the overall voluntary disclosure; the second covers the extent to which each individual item of information is disclosed; the third covers the type of information (e.g. financial information, historical information, management discussion). The results of the study reveal that there was a considerable variation in the disclosure of the index items and also among the listed companies. On average, a company disclosed about 28.95% of the items applicable to it, and only six out of the 53 companies received disclosure scores greater than 50%. It was also found that 50 items out of 62 items included in the index had a disclosure below 50%, and 10 items had disclosure of less than 10%. With respect to the evaluation of different types of information, the analyses indicated that the category of the background information, the category of financial ratios and the category of management discussions were better disclosed in corporate annual reports than the other types of information