Corporate Anti-Corruption Disclosure Findings (TQLI)

TQLI is the most complicated of the metrics being examined in this paper. As explained before, the measure is an average of two components—the first part is the SQNI measure above (word count as a relative score across the sample companies by year), and the second is "richness," which means width and depth. The SHI statistic combines both width (taking account of all questions) and depth (scoring each addressed question between 0 and 3), so with the reduced volumes of anti-corruption disclosure, SHI is chosen as a proxy for the original richness calculation.

The theoretical minimum score for TQLI is 0, and the maximum is 2 (the average of a 1 on SQNI and 3 on SHI). Table 7 shows the minimum score is just 0.06 (for Rio Tinto in 2015, see Table 9), while the highest score is 1.173 (for Evraz in 2018), while the mean is 0.496 (Table 7). Table 8 shows Glencore to have the lowest average TQLI metric through the sample period (0.273), followed by Rio Tinto; Evraz has the highest average, followed by BP. Figure 10 does not show any visual overall trend, and the presentation of the data in Figure 10 would appear to show a rising variation more than any rising average over time.

**Figure 10.** TQLI scores by company by year.

As we have seen, TQLI is made up of two components, with the quantity dimension (number of words) being relative across firms and representing 50% of the metric [59]. The overall TQLI with this revised approach is still reasonably similar to that of [35]. The SQNI calculation mitigates against showing any improvement of reporting over time as every year will have scores between 0 and 1 from the structure of the calculation. Figures 11 and 12 seek to address this through an alternative calculation of SQNI ranking across all years for all companies. Hence, the maximum score of 1 and minimum score of 0 occur only once throughout the sample period. This enables rising or falling scores over time to be represented in the TQLI calculation. The change this produces in Figure 11 is indeed a growth in the metric and the perceived reporting quality over the sample. Figure 12 shows this change in calculation results in SHI becoming a more consistent proportion of the overall TQLI score over time.

**Figure 11.** Average TQLI score by year using alternative SQNI component calculations.

**Figure 12.** The proportion of TQLI derived from SHI with the alternate AQNI calculations.
