Does Environmental Cost Expenditure Matter? Evidence from Selected Countries in the Asia-Pacific Region
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear Authors,
the presented manuscript addresses very important and current issues.
All sources used are relevant and applicable to the manuscript.
I recommend some changes to take into consideration:
1. The authors have identified four specific objectives of their research but did not present a main objective from which presented specific objectives were established.
2. What new contributions does the proposed text make? Which research gap does it fill?
3. The choice of the research methodology used in this study should be justified. The selection of the research sample consists of a number of specific elements, please explain these elements in relation to the research sample selection process used in the presented study (e.g. defining the sampling frame, which method and criteria for determining the sample size were chosen, choice of sampling method, etc.)
4. The bibliographic items used in the Theoretical Literature Review were published a long time ago, this should be updated.
5. For H1, H2, H3, the authors used the term: "have (has) a positive effect on..." This formulation of the research hypotheses is too general, this should be more precise (what does the positive effect mean?). Verification of imprecisely formulated hypotheses is inconclusive, sometimes impossible to verify.
6. In the Empirical Results and Discussion section, the authors should expand the interpretation of the results in comparison with the previous studies. The findings and their implications should be discussed in the broadest context possible and limitations of the work highlighted.
7. Limitations and future research lines should be included.
Author Response
Dear Esteemed Reviewer
We have addressed all your concern about the manuscript. Please refer to the attached document.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
This research is a good contribution the uses industrial level data to examine effect of industrial environmental cost of 578 industries. Overall paper is well organised and presented. However i have some reservations on models. For instance, the explanatory variables seem to have a correlation with each other. For instance, firm size, board size, independence of board, and government disclosure score can have strong influence over ROE. The authors should address the potential multicolinearity.
if this problem is addressed. It would be a good contribution
Author Response
Dear Respected Reviewer.
We have addressed your concern regarding the manuscript. Please refer to attached document.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Comments: Does Environmental Cost Expenditure Matter? Evidence from
Selected Countries in Asia Pacific Region
The paper puts forth an interesting article on the ECA using the legitimacy theory perspective. Although the background to the problem and topic of the paper is nicely portrayed with enough literature support, there is a further need to strengthen the study rationale and novelty of the approach being used. The hypotheses have been developed with enough empirical support. Also, the methods are justified given the data and nature of the analysis. Table 4 of the article gives mean values of different independent variables but it would be much more useful if these values are given for all the countries selected for analysis to facilitate a quick comparison for companies in different countries. This would also help companies of respective countries to focus the aspect where they are deficient or lagging behind. The finding and discussion on the mediating role of environmental performance, is not convincing as the authors simply compare the coefficients in different models without involving and further test or model. Nevertheless, the insights can be drawn from here on. One more thing that makes it confusing is the using of steps which seems to guide readers to the application of various steps in arriving at this conclusion while authors apparently compare results from different models. This result could simply be given by referring to the earlier table (Table 6) instead of focusing them in a separate table and discussing.
Minor: 'were' instead of was (line 12)
'The results show that the level of environmental cost expenditure is? really matter...?
Revise last senetence of abstract as there is some redundancy about data. Also revise keywords as most of them resemble, so use some other ones.
Line 30: In fact, the sustainability of companies can be determined by the management of their environmental. It is incomplete.
Line 248: '...data are....'
Author Response
Dear Respected Reviewer.
We have addressed all your concern regarding the manuscript. Please refer to attached document.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
