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Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Performance Assessment, 2nd Edition

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Economic and Business Aspects of Sustainability".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 October 2025 | Viewed by 2407

Special Issue Editors

1. Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
2. College of Economics, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China
Interests: supply chain finance; ESG; energy and environmental management
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

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Guest Editor
College of Economics, Shenzhen University, 518061 Shenzhen, China
Interests: optimization; supply chain
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

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Guest Editor
Department of Industrial and Manufacturig Systems Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong 999077, China
Interests: manufacturing; logistics; ESG
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Since its debut in a United Nations report in 2006, environmental, social, and governance (collectively referred to as ESG) performance has shifted from the periphery into the mainstream. ESG performance has become a proxy for a company's resilience and risk management capabilities, but it also manifests and enhances the long-term value of a business. Prominent agencies, for example, MSCI, Sustainlytics, Moody, and others, have developed various ESG ratings to assess the ESG performance of companies, funds, and portfolios. However, different rating agencies usually publish different ESG rating results. The disagreement of ESG ratings introduces uncertainty into any decision that is made based on ESG ratings, and thus indicates a challenge for a wide spectrum of decision makers.

This Special Issue calls for a more critical discussion about how ESG performance could be assessed in a more well-designed manner. We particularly invite articles that explore, examine, and propose ESG performance assessment rationales and methods. Both reviews and prescriptive and experimental research assessing ESG performance in industry and regions are welcome.

Topics of potential interest include, but are not restricted to, the following:

  1. ESG reporting;
  2. ESG ratings;
  3. ESG portfolio optimization;
  4. ESG investing;
  5. Construction of ESG measures;
  6. Uncertainty in ESG performance assessment;
  7. Divergency in ESG rating;
  8. ESG data authenticity;
  9. Decision analytics in ESG;
  10. Efficiency analysis in ESG performance evaluation.

Dr. Yelin Fu
Dr. Zelong Yi
Prof. Dr. George G.Q. Huang
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • ESG performance assessment
  • ESG rating
  • ESG data authenticity
  • ESG measure
  • ESG investing

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

27 pages, 1616 KiB  
Article
Evaluating the Anti-Corruption Factor in Environmental, Social, and Governance Indices by Sampling Large Financial Asset Management Firms
by Kenneth David Strang and Narasimha Rao Vajjhala
Sustainability 2024, 16(23), 10240; https://doi.org/10.3390/su162310240 - 22 Nov 2024
Viewed by 1970
Abstract
Current Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) indices are flawed because the data are incomplete and not reported consistently, and some measured factors may be irrelevant to the industry. Regulators in the financial services industry emphasize reporting CO2 emissions (environmental factor), yet the [...] Read more.
Current Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) indices are flawed because the data are incomplete and not reported consistently, and some measured factors may be irrelevant to the industry. Regulators in the financial services industry emphasize reporting CO2 emissions (environmental factor), yet the key resources leveraged for production are rented offices, and internet–governance issues like money laundering, corruption, and unethical behavior would be more relevant. To investigate this problem, we sampled the finance and insurance industry firms in the USA with the greatest economic impact, i.e., those managing at least USD 1 trillion in assets. We used artificial intelligence to collect data about undisclosed legal decisions against firms to measure the ESG anti-corruption governance factor GRI 206-1, defined by the Global Reporting Institute (GRI) for global sustainable development goals (SDGs), which correspond to the United Nations’ SDGs. We applied Bayesian correlation with bootstrapping to test our hypotheses, followed by root cause analysis. We found that ESG ratings from providers did not reflect legal cases decided against firms; the Bayesian BF+0 odds ratio was 3005 (99% confidence intervals were 0.617, 0.965). Also, misconduct fines and arbitration legal case counts were significantly related for the same firm (the Vovk-Selke maximum p-ratio was 4411), but most ESG scores were significantly different for the same firm. We found three other studies in the literature that corroborated some of our findings that specific firms in our sample were considered to be unethical. We propose deeper study of the implications related to our findings based on public interest and stakeholder theory. Full article
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