In the context of increased awareness for complying with the multiple requirements for sustainable development, the stakeholders need to have the proper information for analyzing the corporate behaviors from various perspectives. Thus, the purpose of this research is to investigate and map the sustainability patterns of European companies at the beginning of 2019, in order to uncover valuable insights into the corporate sustainable behaviors. The Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) performances of 1165 European companies were considered by applying the Kohonen neural network for clustering purposes at three main levels: (1) ESG overall level, including country and sectoral perspectives; (2) ESG thematic level; (3) ESG four-folded innovative level (stakeholder, perspective, management level and focus views). All three analyses carried out show a three-clustering solution—Lower, Middle and Higher ESG clusters. Most firms are top ESG performers and the companies with good ESG scores also have more related controversies. The results highlight the sustainability profiles of the examined companies. Firstly, the environmental and social priorities are preferred over corporate governance targets. Secondly, companies tend to implement a business-customized ESG approach for achieving organizational efficiency and competitiveness. Thirdly, there is a higher consideration of employees, external-directed measures, operational issues and process-orientation in the corporate ESG performance and development. The ESG approach of the European reporting companies is mainly mature, strategic and long-term oriented, aimed to increase the corporate competitiveness and to support the societal well-being altogether.

Abstract:In a global setting where the requirements for development equally address the economic viability but also social and environmental sustainability, the healthy and efficient growth of rural communities poses substantial challenges. Our paper focuses on specific conditions and constraints that influence the progress of agritourism business initiatives as viable entrepreneurial solutions for self-sustainable rural communities in Romania. To assess the impact of economic, social and tourism-related factors on agritourism entrepreneurship for Romanian counties during 2010-2015 periods, we conducted several Ordinary Least Square regression models. The results emphasize that economic indicators like regional GDP and kilometers of national roads have a positive influence on the number of agritourism business units; also, a positive impact on agritourism entrepreneurship was identified for tourism-related factors like: number of employees and corresponding salaries in tourism, total tourists, share of tourism firms and their turnover in total firms and turnover of the region, as well as preference of tourists for agritourism. The conclusions highlight the direct link between resilient agritourism entrepreneurship and sustainable development of the region and open further research directions.

No abstract

No abstract