Disclosure Voluntário de Informa es Ambientais, Econ micas e Sociais em Cooperativas do Setor Agropecuário

This article aims to determinate and to compare the level of voluntary disclosure in financial statements of agricultural cooperatives and companies of the agricultural segment. In order to accomplish this, we have analyzed the financial statements of the year 2008. For data collection we used a metric to guide the content analysis and, for data analysis, three indices were developed to permit the next three levels valuation: i) level of company compliance to the voluntary disclosure; ii) the disclosure level of firms that practice voluntary disclosure; iii) the general level of voluntary disclosure. We concluded that cooperatives have higher level of environmental and social voluntary disclosure than companies of the agricultural segment. On the other hand, companies of the agricultural segment have a higher level of economic voluntary disclosure. The conclusions confirmed the three hypotheses previously stated. It is worth mentioning that the results can not be generalized because they are restricted to a sample of a specific sector and based in the financial statements of one accounting period.