Sustainability Reporting Based on GRI Standards within Organizations in Romania

Abstract

This article aims to establish an overview of sustainable development practices within organizations in Romania, to analyze how these practices are connected to GRI (Global Reporting Initiative) indexes, and to identify the connection between the efforts made to ensure sustainable processes and the economic performance of the enterprise. Given the ever more prevalent digitalization of the company processes, implementing a sustainability management system and a sustainability monitoring system becomes more accessible, and there is increasing transparency of the information on the activities supporting sustainability. Using the methodology, the authors carried out a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the content of the sustainability reports published by Romanian companies in the top 500 by the number of employees. The economic and financial data on these companies were taken from the topfirme.ro platform. Based on the sustainability reports published by the companies, the sustainability score was calculated using the reported data, according to the GRI (Global Reporting Initiative) standard and analyzed considering the industry in which the organizations operate, specific industries being more sensitive to environmental issues due to certain specificities of their economic activity that is based on processes prone to hurt the environment. During the research, hypotheses were formulated and tested regarding the factors that could influence the reporting of activities in support of sustainability (the sustainability report score and the page count of the sustainability report) and the economic performance of organizations (profit, income). One of the study’s conclusions was related to the financial performance of companies expressed by the net profit. It is positively influenced, although to a small degree, but promising in terms of the future of company policies on freedom of association and collective bargaining, expressed in the sustainability report through the GRI index. Regarding the company belonging to a particular industry sector, the research proved that the companies’ sustainability policies are not influenced by it, which could point to the idea that sustainability issues are equally crucial for all industries. Furthermore, an essential conclusion of the research is that the performance and the reliability of sustainability policies must be monitored and implemented within an integrated sustainability management system, which would ensure a high level of coherence and transparency of the guidelines, the provided data, but also of the monitoring within companies or by the stakeholders. Finally, the research offers results regarding the interest of Romanian organizations in the measures and actions taken to ensure the sustainable development of the economic environment.

Company-Level Factors of Non-Financial Reporting Quality under a Mandatory Regime: A Systematic Review of Empirical Evidence in the European Union

“…Companies compute this indicator for different periods of time, to identify business lines that no longer generate increased revenues and to take adequate management decisions to remediate financial and operational deficiencies. No significant correlation was identified between NP and NFRQ [45].…”

“…Of these indicators, the most frequently used is SZTA, identified in nine studies, followed by SZE, in four studies. In contrast, we identified EXP and TOVR, each in a single study [41,45]. Most of the correlations identified between the five variables measuring company size and NFRQ are positive.…”

The Effect of Supply Chain Sustainability Practices on Romanian SME Performance

“…Approximately 43.5% of the variance of the endogenous variable BP is explained by the joint action of the exogenous variables ECSC, SOSC, and ENSC. Some studies demonstrate improved business performance as a result of applying sustainability practices to supply-chain-integrated enterprises [110][111][112][113].…”

Effects on corporate stakeholders and limitations of the implementation of the Non-Financial Reporting Directive (2014/95/EU)

“…Reporting on With its extensive history of advancing NFR best practices, GRI can facilitate the transition to sustainability in organizations (La Torre et al, 2020). In addition, the performance and reliability of non-financial reporting policies should be monitored, after data flows are implemented in a specialized non-financial data management system (Mihai & Aleca, 2023). This would increase the transparency of policies, data, responsible owners, processes, controls, outcomes and disclosures.…”

“…between NFI and return on assets, respectively return on equity, were found for Romanian manufacturing companies, analyzed between 2017 and 2019 (Hategan et al, 2021). Also, Mihai and Aleca (2023) found that, in the case of Romanian companies, the net profit is positively influenced by NFI quality, which was assessed based on the Global Reporting Initiatives (GRI) standards.…”