Considering the present state of environmental destruction, civil society is demanding the businesses to play a proactive role in the societal and environmental objectives.

This makes environmental accounting an important tool for the accounting discipline. In the first paper, "Decision Usefulness of Corporate Environmental Reporting and Firm Performance: Evidence from Sri Lanka", the authors, D M M B Dissanayake and E M A S B Ekanayake, attempt to assess the degree to which such corporate environmental reporting contributes to firm performance in Sri Lanka. The authors concentrate on qualitative characteristics, and find that understandability and comparability have higher scores than relevance and faithful representation. The authors use three performance indicators, ROA, ROE and EPS, to measure the decision usefulness of corporate environmental reporting and firm performance, and observe that a two-way positive and significant association exists between the performance of the firms and reporting. The authors conclude that proper policy or environmental management systems will lead to increased yield for corporates in Sri Lanka.

Environmental accounting is an important tool to understand the role played by business enterprises in the economy towards environmental safety and welfare. But this role varies depending upon certain firm characteristics like industry type, age, size, profitability and liquidity, leading to a difference in the extent of environmental information disclosure. With this outlook, the authors, Mahesh Chand Garg and Sandeep Kumar, in the second paper, "The Relationship Between Corporate Environmental Reporting Practices and Company Characteristics: Evidence from India", examine the relationship between the reporting practices and specific firm characteristics for Indian companies. The authors attempt to identify the characteristics having positive effect on information disclosure and find that larger companies disclose more environmental information. The authors find that industry type and size of the company are positively affected by the extent of environmental information disclosure in annual reports.

The next wave of leaders in industrial manufacturing will build an ecosystem that capitalizes on maximizing efficiency for themselves and their customers. In a slow growth environment like India, industrial manufacturers have an opportunity to profit from innovation strategies that build upon advanced manufacturing concepts. Hence they become more aggressive and deliberate in their investments, focusing on developing technology platforms and new operating models that improve efficiency, costs and performance of factories and other capital projects. In the third paper, "Microeconomic and Macroeconomic Determinants of Efficiency: Evidence from Indian Industrial Machinery Sector", the author, Sumit Kumar Maji, attempts to explore different determinants of efficiency for firms in the Indian industrial machinery sector. The author finds that leverage, size, openness, age and inflation are the major determinants of efficiency of the industrial machinery firms operating in India during the study period.

Managers use a variety of methods to manipulate profits, specifically under financial distress. Managers of distressed firms engage more in income decreasing earnings management practices as compared to their healthy firm counterparts. Earnings management is the use of accounting techniques to produce financial reports that present an overly positive view of a company's business activities and financial position. In the fourth paper, "Earnings Management Strategies During Financial Distress", the authors, Neerav Nagar and Kaustav Sen, examine whether financial distress and its severity affect the managers' decisions with respect to the choice of earnings management strategies. The authors find that the managers of distressed firms try to trade off between liquidity, profitability and solvency of the firm using different earnings management strategies.