Study of the determinants of environmental coporate disclosure : case of Tunisia and Morocco

L'objectif de cette recherche est d'évaluer la communication environnementale (CE) des entreprises tunisiennes et marocaines et de déterminer les facteurs susceptibles de la favoriser ou de la contraindre. En se basant sur la théorie des parties prenantes, nous empruntons le modèle conceptuel d'Ullmann (1985) pour tester l'effet du pouvoir des parties prenantes, de la culture d'entreprise, de la situation économique et financière de l'organisation sur l'étendue de la CE. L'échantillon de l'étude est composé de 18 entreprises tunisiennes et de 20 entreprises marocaines cotées respectivement sur les bourses de Tunis et de Casablanca. L'évaluation de l'étendue de la CE est faite sur la base des rapports annuels collectés sur la période allant de 2000 à 2007. Les résultats de l'analyse quantitative montrent que la CE est principalement orientée vers les actionnaires et les investisseurs. En outre, l'influence de la culture d'entreprise, de la situation économique et financière de l'entreprise, du secteur d'activité, de la taille ainsi que du pays d'origine est confirmée. Dans le but d'approfondir ces résultats, une analyse qualitative est conduite sur 10 cas d'entreprises retenus de l'échantillon initial. Les résultats révèlent que le niveau d'internationalisation de l'activité de l'entreprise, son appartenance à une multinationale réputée par son engagement dans le développement durable, la taille de l'auditeur ainsi que la composition du Conseil d'Administration expliquent l'étendue de la CE des entreprises tunisiennes et marocaines.The purpose of this research is to assess the corporate environmental reporting (CER) of Tunisian and Moroccan companies and to determine the factors likely to support it or constrain it. Relying on the stakeholder theory, we use the conceptual model of Ullmann (1985) to test the effect of the stakeholder power, corporate culture and the economic and financial performances on the extent of the CER. The sample comprises 18 Tunisian and 20 Moroccan companies listed respectively on Tunisian and Moroccan stock exchanges markets. The evaluation of the extent of CER is made on the basis of annual reports collected over the period from 2000 to 2007. The results of the quantitative analysis show that CER is made mainly to shareholders and investors. The influence of corporate culture, economic and financial performances, company's industry, size and country's origin is confirmed. Furthermore, a qualitative analysis is conducted on 10 companies selected from the initial sample. The results reveal that the company's level of internationalization, being a subsidiary of multinational renowned for its commitment to sustainable development, the size of the auditor and the composition of the Board explain the extent of the CER of Tunisian and Moroccan companies

Modeling Documents for Structure Recognition Using Generalized N-Grams

In this paper we present and discuss a novel approach to modeling logical structures of documents, based on a statistical representation of patterns in a document class. An efficient and error tolerant recognition heuristics adapted to the model is proposed. The statistical approach permits easily automated and incremental learning of the model. The approach has been partially evaluated on a prototype. A discussion of the results achieved by the prototype is finally made. 1 Introduction The need for strongly structured documents has been recognized for a long time and their importance increases with the development of new software applications. Several approaches and systems have been proposed to address this still open issue [4, 7, 8, 10, 16, 13]. It is commonly admitted that documents can be represented by their hierarchically organized physical and logical structures. The recognition of the logical structure roughly consists in mapping a logical tree on a physical one. The protot..

Integrated Multi-Agent Architecture for Assisted Document Recognition

This paper focuses on the design of a software architecture that can support the programming challenges of CIDRE. This is in itself an important research issue, because in document image analysis as in many other domains, it is a real challenge to integrate coherently all the existing know-how; that's why the effort should not only be put on inventing new algorithms for specific subtasks, but also on finding a relevant framework to combine at best various software components. Section 2 addresses the architectural problems raised by the specification of the desired system. Our proposition is presented in section 3, in terms of the integration of existing software components. We show then in section 4 how the proposed framework was successfully used for a restricted application, and what kind of problems are expected for a generalization of the prototype