Sustainable Practices in Italian Businesses: Environmental, Social and Economic Aspects

Description

This SpringerBrief describes the development and use of a synthetic indicator to assess different degrees of sustainability adoption by economic sector and businesses size. To make this analysis a theoretical framework which involves variables common to alternative frameworks (specifically ESG, GRI and Istat) is proposed. The empirical analysis focuses on the environmental, social and economic variables of the Italian businesses. In this analysis, all three pillars of sustainability – economic, environmental, and social – are considered.   The work begins with a review of business sustainability literature and a look into institutional frameworks for the development and measurement of the phenomena. Connections between businesses and the SDGs are examined and comparison of the classifications of sustainable activities defined by GRI and ESG international standards is used to define a framework to be adopted to analyse ISTAT Business Census. Selected indicator variables are aggregated with a synthetic indicator and the results are presented (this is a new proposal of a synthetic indicator useful for the type of data used and published by ISTAT – Italian National Statistical Institute), discussing pros and cons of using it.  This study provides two important innovative contributions. The first one is about how to approach the theoretical framework of businesses sustainability at firms aggregated level. The basic idea to work on a set of variables common to different approaches is interesting from the interpretative point of view. The second one, is about the specific empirical analysis, i.e. the Italian businesses sustainability situation. The investigation based on this new theoretical classification/framework and the new proposed indicator provides some interesting substantive results.  Contents Abbreviations Chapter 1: Sustainability Background and Literature 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Defining Sustainability 1.3 Pillars of Sustainability (Identifying the Dimensions of Sustainability) 1.4 The Different Structures of the Dimensions of Sustainability 1.5 Sustainability Initiatives and Indexes 1.5.1 A Short Historical Overview of the Sustainability Initiatives 1.5.1.1 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Initiatives 1.5.1.2 The World Bank, Monitoring Environmental Progress 1.5.1.3 UN Department of Policy Co-ordination and Sustainable Development 1.5.1.4 European Environment Agency 1.5.1.5 European Common Indicators 1.5.2 The Current State of Art 1.5.2.1 General Level Initiatives EUROSTAT Sustainable Initiatives UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) National Government Sustainability Guidelines and Initiatives More on Sustainability Initiatives: An Italian Perspective 1.5.2.2 Business Level Initiatives OECD Measuring the Non-financial Performance of Firms through the Lens of the OECD Well-being Framework Standards for Disaster Risk Reduction (ISO 14000, ISO 26000) United Nation Global Compact, UNGC Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG) Bibliography Chapter 2: Developing a Synthetic Index of Business Sustainability 2.1 Methodology for Composite Indicator 2.1.1 How Some of the Steps of Constructing CI Have Been Faced in the Research Context 2.2 A New Indicator for Measuring Businesses’ Sustainability 2.2.1 Theoretical Framework and Variables Selection 2.2.1.1 Business Sustainability and the SDGs 2.2.1.2 A New Classification of Sustainability: Connection between GRI-ESG-ISTAT variables 2.2.2 Data Treatment, Normalization, Transformation and Aggregation 2.2.2.1 Data Treatment and Preliminary Statistics 2.2.2.2 Correlation Analysis 2.2.2.3 Correlation Between Selected Indicator Variables 2.2.2.4 Transformation, Weighting, and Aggregation 2.2.2.5 How We Compute the ABR INDEX 2.2.2.6 Validating a Synthetic Indicator 2.3 Methodology for Analyzing Sustainability and Profitability and Productivity Bibliography Chapter 3: Application of the Sustainable Index: A Feature of Sustainability in Italian Businesses 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Data and Source of Data for Our Analysis 3.3 Sustainability Actions in the Italian Businesses 3.4 The Sustainability ABR Index 3.4.1 Social Dimension- Internal, External, Safety and Security 3.4.2 Size and Sector of Business 3.5 Italian Businesses’ Contribution to the SDGs 3.5.1 An Elaboration of ISTAT Data Variables under the SDG Mapping 3.6 Comparing Indexes, Importance of the ABR INDEX 3.7 A Relationship Between Sustainability Level and Level of Profitability and Productivity 3.8 Synthesis of the Results Bibliography Chapter 4: Appendix Index