Najmeh Hajian and Ali Asghar Anvari Rostami, The Macrotheme Review 3(3), Spring 2014 73 The Macrotheme Review A multidisciplinary journal of global macro trends TRANSPARENCY AND DISCLOSURE INDICES IN EMERGING MARKETS Najmeh Hajian and Ali Asghar Anvari Rostami Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran Abstract ITransparency is the extent to which investors have ready access to any required financial and non-financial information about a company. In this paper we focus on transparency models that have used in developing and developed countries by researchers and compare the area of attention that these two groups of researchers had in their transparency and disclosure models. Finally, we compare the transparency and disclosure scores that computed by researchers in developing and developed countries. Results show that disclosure and transparency models conducted in developed and developing countries are not significantly different in aspect of the number of components of disclosure and amount of attention that these models pay to various disclosure areas. However, based on their disclosure scores, transparency level of firms in developed countries is higher than in developing countries. Keywords: TRANSPARENCY, DISCLOSURE, EMERGING MARKETS 1. Introduction Since, the 1960s there has been an increased interest in transparency and disclosure research. In majority of these studies, a self-constructed index has used to measure level of transparency of a sample of firms. Some different approaches for measuring level of disclosure and transparency have emerged in the literature. The first and foremost approach is primarily based on sending questionnaire forms to a number of financial accounting users requesting them to rank specified disclosure items in accordance with their degree of importance for decision-making processes. Others select important disclosure items based on a deep study of disclosure literature. The third approach used to determine disclosure index items is investigation of financial statements and other source of information and then select the most common and important items disclosed. In addition, some studies address the association between a constructed disclosure index of mandatory, voluntary or total accounting disclosure and certain firm characteristics. As the approach of constructing transparency index in different studies is different, the number of items in indices, the categories considered in indices and the area of information they notice and therefore level of transparency that they report is different too. In this study we to compare some of these indices and show which area and categories of information are considered. Also we try to