Basis of generated economic value distribution for business sustainability

Abstract

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been discussed over the last four decades. Global social demands require organizations to report their environmental and social impact, which can be done based on the standards of Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). These establish that economic value can be distributed in at least 5 aspects: Operational Costs, Salary and Employee Benefits, Payments to Suppliers, Payments to Government, and Investments in the Community. Given this, from a stakeholder’s perspective, inquiries arise about concentration in the distributed value. After an exploratory qualitative analysis followed by an Ensembled Clustering algorithm implementation, 3 and 5 groups were identified in 2018 and 2019 respectively from the companies with greater presences in the stock market. Each group has concentrations in 4 of the 5 aspects previously listed by the GRI. According to the results, the identification of these groups would allow investors to know the spotlights on the distributed value generation so using this as inputs when investments are made. Additionally, according to the results, the characteristics related to the Investments in the Community was identified as not considered by any groups, opening a gap of differentiating aspect and improvement by companies.