The purposes of environmental accounting
The purpose of environment accounting is of particular interest in the Japanese context
because each of the two key governmental environmental accounting initiatives
has emphasized a different application – external disclosure in the case of the MOE
initiative and internal management in the case of the METI initiative.
The questionnaire provided the choice of four possible responses on this issue: (1)
considerably more emphasis is placed on internal management than on external
information disclosure; (2) slightly more emphasis is placed on internal management;
(3) slightly more emphasis is placed on external information disclosure; (4)
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considerably more emphasis is placed on external information disclosure than on
internal management. The results are shown in Table 1.