Acceso usuarios
Roberto Fernández Gago, José Luis Godos Díez, Ángel Morán Muñoz, Laura Cabeza García
El objetivo del presente trabajo es analizar el compromiso empresarial en materia de ODS de las empresas españolas no cotizadas, apenas consideradas en estudios previos, así como identificar las posibles variables relacionadas con este compromiso. Adicionalmente, se han buscado diferencias en base a características empresariales escasamente estudiadas en este ámbito. Nuestros resultados sugieren que aún hay margen de mejora a la hora de implantar los ODS a nivel empresarial en España y ponen de manifiesto que existe una asociación positiva entre el compromiso en materia de ODS y las siguientes variables: tamaño empresarial, activos intangibles, actividad internacional y propiedad pública
In 2015, the United Nations General Assembly established the 2030 Agenda and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which outline the social, economic and environmental cornerstones of sustainable development. In order to achieve these goals, a conjoint effort by governments, society and private sector has proven to be necessary. Focusing on the latter agent, the aim of this work is to analyze the business commitment to SDGs and to identify potential variables related to this concept.
To achieve these goals, a sample of Spanish unlisted companies has been drawn, given the scarcity of previous research on this type of firms. A descriptive study about their general commitment to SDGs has been performed based on information from the United Nations Global Compact progress reports. In addition, we have looked for differences between companies by means of organizational traits that have been barely considered by former studies on this field. For this purpose, groups of enterprises were built up through a hierarchical cluster to analyze the profile of firms committed to the SDGs fulfillment, and subsamples were compared by means of Mann-Whitney U and chi-square tests.
Our results suggest that, despite the progress achieved, there is still room for improvement when it comes to SDG implementation at the business level in Spain. Moreover, our descriptive analysis sheds light on the positive association between business commitment to SDGs and firm size, investment on intangible assets, international activities, and state owned companies. Nevertheless, we could not find any relationship between business commitment to SDGs and Return on Equity (ROE), firm age, business sector, family ownership, corporate ownership or financial entity ownership.
This study tries to contribute to the still limited research on the interrelation between firms and the SDGs, which is particularly scarce in the case of unlisted Spanish companies, despite their essential role in economic development, employment, and social welfare worldwide. Our analysis can help these businesses to make relevant decisions aimed at improving their sustainability performance and guaranteeing their long-term survival. Furthermore, these results may be useful when designing public policies to promote the SDGs such as subsidies, tax benefits or preferences in public tenders
