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Accounting and Sustainability Reporting in the COVID-19 Pandemic: New Trends and Development

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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: closed (25 November 2022) | Viewed by 27431

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Dr. Francesco Paolone

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Faculty of Economics, Universitas Mercatorum, Piazza Mattei, 10, 00186 Rome, Italy
Interests: accounting; financial reporting; sustainability

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in December 2019, declared by the World Health Organization a global pandemic in March 2020, humanity has faced an emergency that primarily concerned health and safety. This has not only resulted in a global public health crisis, but it has also had a very large negative impact on economic activity. In response, governments around the world have taken various steps to mitigate the adverse health and economic effects.

This Special Issue aims to provide innovative approaches in studying the intertwined relations between sustainability, accounting, and business strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic. It specifically seeks to provide empirical and conceptual evidence on the role played by accounting and sustainability reporting in the COVID-19 pandemic at a global level, to extend our knowledge of accounting in times of emergency as well as of how to improve the preparedness of organizations and society in order to prevent future crises.

Topics of interest for this Special Issue include (but are not limited to):

The policy response to deal with the COVID-19 crisis as well as the ESG issue;
Sustainability reporting and disclosure after COVID-19:
- Re-examine the materiality assessment and its integration into enterprise risk management;
- Determine what non-financial information stakeholders need to judge the effectiveness of companies’ responses to COVID-19;
- Significantly increase connectivity between sustainability and financial reports;
- Take inspiration from climate reporting to disclose on company resilience;
- Collaborate with industry peers to ensure comparable COVID-19 disclosures;
Sustainable business strategies after COVID-19;
Corporate governance and sustainable practices after COVID-19;
Internal control and sustainability after COVID-19;
Digitalization and sustainability after COVID-19.

Dr. Francesco Paolone
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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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

sustainability reporting
accounting
business strategy disclosure
corporate governance

Published Papers (10 papers)

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Research

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18 pages, 892 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Impact of COVID-19 on University Activities: Comparison of Experiences from Slovakia and Georgia

by Alexander V. Sirotkin, Martina Pavlíková, Ľubomír Hlad, Roman Králik, Irina Zarnadze, Shalva Zarnadze and Lucia Petrikovičová

Sustainability 2023, 15(3), 1897; https://doi.org/10.3390/su15031897 - 19 Jan 2023

Cited by 16 | Viewed by 1858

Abstract

The paper examines the recent trends in international mobility, attractivity for international students, and the number of publications of two universities (Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, Slovakia, CPU and Tbilisi State Medical University, Georgia, TSMU) to understand whether the COVID-19 pandemic affected these processes and whether the adverse consequences of the pandemic were still retained after its end. In addition, we examined the influence of EU support for these processes. For this purpose, we analyzed the rates of international mobility (the number of outgoing and incoming students and employees, the number of international students, and the number of publications indexed in SCOPUS and the WoS database of CPU and TSMU before, during, and after the abolishment of administrative restrictions induced by the COVID-19 pandemic. The comparison of CPU and TSMU demonstrated the similarity between these universities in the development of international contacts and cooperation. The indexes of international mobility and the number of publications in the EU university CPU were higher than those in the non-EU TSMU. On the other hand, before COVID-19, the indexes of international mobility and the number of publications of TSMU were stable or tended to decline, but in CPU, they increased. COVID-19 had a negative impact on all indexes of international mobility, but the number of international students continued to increase in both universities, even during the pandemic. The use of home offices during the pandemic promoted an increase in the number of international publications among authors from CPU but not among those from TSMU. After the end of the pandemic, in both universities, the indexes of international mobility increased but sometimes did not return to pre-pandemic levels. In the post-COVID-19 period, in both CPU and TSMU, the number of international students continued to grow, and the number of publications declined. These observations highlight the trend of internalization experienced by both universities, the negative impact of COVID on their international mobility, and the importance of EU support for research. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Accounting and Sustainability Reporting in the COVID-19 Pandemic: New Trends and Development)

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16 pages, 289 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Stopping or Continuing to Follow Best Practices in Terms of ESG during the COVID-19 Pandemic? An Exploratory Study of European Listed Companies

by Giuseppe Maria Bifulco, Riccardo Savio, Maria Federica Izzo and Riccardo Tiscini

Sustainability 2023, 15(3), 1796; https://doi.org/10.3390/su15031796 - 17 Jan 2023

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 1706

Abstract

This study aims to examine the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance for European listed companies. The purpose of this study is to understand if and how the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak influenced the behavior of European companies in terms of best practices in ESG. In this paper, we consider the ESG score as a proxy of management practices. The ESG score was collected for all companies included in the STOXX 600 index (from the Refinitiv Eikon database) and analyzed using fixed and random effects. The sample is composed of 600 European listed companies and covers the period from 2018 to 2021. The results show that even in a health crisis with economic repercussions for the whole world, companies have continued to increase their commitment to ESG targets. The results are robust, also considering the different components of the ESG score (environment, social, governance) individually. This paper validates the significance for companies to improve their ESG performance even during unstable times. Our analysis has implications from several perspectives, adding supplementary information and considerations to the uncompleted debate examining the effects of external shocks on ESG performance. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Accounting and Sustainability Reporting in the COVID-19 Pandemic: New Trends and Development)

21 pages, 664 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Impact and Mechanism of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Corporate Financing: Evidence from Listed Companies in China

by Lianggui Liao, Chan Wang, Hong-Xing Wen, Pu-Yan Nie and Ying Huang

Sustainability 2023, 15(2), 1032; https://doi.org/10.3390/su15021032 - 05 Jan 2023

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1558

Abstract

The unexpected emergence of COVID-19 has placed businesses throughout the globe under considerable financial hardship, and financial constraints are a significant barrier to business expansion, particularly in developing countries with insufficient credit markets. Using yearly data for Chinese listed businesses from 367 cities, we examine the impact of COVID-19 on financial restrictions and the corresponding mechanisms of action by using a difference-in-differences (DID) methodology. We discover that COVID-19 leads to a significant increase of 0.117 in the KZ index of listed firms, i.e., an increase in financing constraints, and this result is consistent with various robustness tests. We also show that COVID-19 considerably lowers a company’s capacity to obtain external financing by increasing debt costs and deterring commercial credit. The pandemic significantly reduced the company’s commercial credit by 0.008 and increased debt costs by 0.2%. Moreover, the data demonstrate variation across industries, business ownership, and firm scale. Our findings indicate that decreasing information asymmetries facilitate successful adaptation to and recovery from external shocks. Our analysis suggests that governments should promulgate policies that are conducive to corporate financing to help companies maintain development during the outbreak of the epidemic and ensure economic sustainability. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Accounting and Sustainability Reporting in the COVID-19 Pandemic: New Trends and Development)

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20 pages, 725 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Does Innovation Spur Integrated Reporting?

by Ricardo Pinto, Isabel Lourenço and Ana Simões

Sustainability 2023, 15(1), 657; https://doi.org/10.3390/su15010657 - 30 Dec 2022

Viewed by 1446

Abstract

This study analyses whether country-level innovation performance and firm-level innovation commitment are associated to adopting the integrated reporting in Europe. The empirical analysis relies on a logistic regression model applied to 388 firm-year observations regarding firms located in Europe and data between 2016–2019. The results show a positive and significant association between country-level innovation performance and integrated reporting uptake. Moreover, at a firm level, the data partially support that the influence of innovation commitment on the likelihood of publishing integrated reports is higher for firms with a higher-level of sustainability performance. This research contributes to the literature by focusing simultaneously on the impact of country-level innovation performance and firm-level innovation commitment on integrated reporting acceptance in the European setting. In addition, the adopted country-level conceptual support is based on the institutional theory combined with the framework of the national innovation systems. The latter, to the best of our knowledge, has not yet been applied in this line of research. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Accounting and Sustainability Reporting in the COVID-19 Pandemic: New Trends and Development)

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12 pages, 1412 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Rise of MCS and EMA in the Sustainable Field: A Systematic Literature Analysis

by Tiantian Wang, Kamisah Ismail and Khairul Saidah Abas Azmi

Sustainability 2022, 14(24), 16532; https://doi.org/10.3390/su142416532 - 09 Dec 2022

Viewed by 1432

Abstract

Sustainable development is becoming increasingly popular in all fields and the importance of sustainability and business issues will grow. Despite the increase in scholarly attention paid to improving organizational sustainability performance, such as Management Control Systems (MCS) and Environmental Management Accounting (EMA), few studies have been conducted on the relationship between MCS and EMA, with no aggregation of findings and knowledge. To fill this void, this study conducted a systematic literature review of the MCS and EMA in the field of sustainability. A comprehensive search was conducted for journal articles that addressed MCS and EMA issues in the context of sustainability. Considering that EMA and MCS are more widely used in manufacturing, this study focuses on the manufacturing industry. Based on rigorous inclusion and exclusion criteria, 43 journal articles were selected for the final analysis. The bibliometric data from the identified studies, their theoretical and methodological approaches, research themes, and research backgrounds were analyzed in this review. As a result, this study identifies existing gaps in the current literature, provides directions for the organization to research internal systems’ interactions and suggests future research directions with specific research agendas. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Accounting and Sustainability Reporting in the COVID-19 Pandemic: New Trends and Development)

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37 pages, 4255 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Insight into the Critical Success Factors of Performance-Based Budgeting Implementation in the Public Sector for Sustainable Development in the COVID-19 Pandemic

by Pham Quang Huy and Vu Kien Phuc

Sustainability 2022, 14(20), 13198; https://doi.org/10.3390/su142013198 - 14 Oct 2022

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2662

Abstract

This research sets its sights on producing a precise and meticulous analysis in order to identify critical success factors (CSFs) of behavioral intention to adopt performance-based budgeting (BIA) during the COVID-19 pandemic. The statistical data employed in this study were drawn from repeated cross-sectional samples of accountants within public sector organizations in relation to BIA, spanning 3 years. In order to bring forth the hypothesized interlinks, the analytical techniques used comprised structural equation modeling and mean comparisons. The analyses of the results substantiated the positive interconnections among CSFs in terms of significance and effect size. On the basis of the degree of stability of the obtained findings, the most stable CSFs of BIA were ascertained. Beyond widening the frontier of knowledge on the benefits of performance-based budgeting (PBB) in public sector organizations and the CSFs of BIA, the obtained findings can guide leaders in public sector organizations to sense and seize how they can become efficient and effective in the journey towards PBB implementation and how they can formulate intense strategies for successfully managing the transformation process. The advantages of a more fine-grained understanding in this research can allow policymakers to promulgate laws and rules for the implementation of PBB. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Accounting and Sustainability Reporting in the COVID-19 Pandemic: New Trends and Development)

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16 pages, 304 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Analyst Earnings Forecast Optimism during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence from China

by Yan Yu

Sustainability 2022, 14(19), 12758; https://doi.org/10.3390/su141912758 - 07 Oct 2022

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1228

Abstract

Analysts are important participants in the capital market, but there are relatively few studies on the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on analysts’ behaviors. This article examines the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on the analysts’ earnings forecast optimism by using a sample of visits to Chinese listed firms during 2019–2020. We find that the analysts’ earnings forecasts become less optimistic and show pessimism after the outbreak of COVID-19. This result is consistent with past research findings that major natural disasters lead to analysts’ forecasts pessimism. However, we also find that the earnings forecasts issued by analysts with on-site visits are more optimistic after the COVID-19 outbreak. The increase in optimism is associated with accounting information transparency, the proportion of tangible assets, and the revenue geographical concentration of the visited companies. Further analysis shows that higher optimism in visiting analysts’ earnings forecasts after the COVID-19 outbreak leads to a positive market response, suggesting that optimism in visiting analysts’ forecasts misleads the market’s resource allocation. We also find that the higher level of optimism in visiting analysts’ earnings forecasts disappeared after the COVID-19 outbreak was well controlled. Overall, our study enriches the study of the impact of COVID-19 on capital markets from the perspective of analysts’ forecast optimism. Investors in other countries should also be aware of the impact of similar phenomena. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Accounting and Sustainability Reporting in the COVID-19 Pandemic: New Trends and Development)

13 pages, 281 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Effective Risk Management and Sustainable Corporate Performance Integrating Innovation and Intellectual Capital: An Application on Istanbul Exchange Market

by Sara Faedfar, Mustafa Özyeşil, Mustafa Çıkrıkçı and Esin Benhür Aktürk

Sustainability 2022, 14(18), 11532; https://doi.org/10.3390/su141811532 - 14 Sep 2022

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1901

Abstract

Risk management requires firms to mitigate the negative consequences of market dynamics on their performance outcomes. Traditional risk management solely addresses the threats and negative consequences of risk. However, total (effective) risk management is capable of regulating out-of-control market conditions to boost corporate performance by restraining market volatility and hence providing return sustainability considering the opportunities of risk as well. Based on a sample of 286 firm-year observations drawn from 26 firms listed on Borsa Istanbul, BIST-50 index, the empirical study examines the association between total risk management and firm performance and the moderating role of innovation, intellectual capital, and the pandemic period for the years 2011–2021. The analysis is performed by applying the hierarchical panel regression using ROE and ROI as proxies to measure firm performance. The results have shown that there is a positive association between total risk management and performance measures, especially among firms applying more innovation and intellectual capital investments. However, the effect of innovation on the performance relationship of total risk management (ROE) was found to be negative surprisingly. Moreover, results suggest that total risk management has a lower positive association with firm performance during the pandemic period for both performance measures. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Accounting and Sustainability Reporting in the COVID-19 Pandemic: New Trends and Development)

16 pages, 3591 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Effect of Perceived Usefulness, Reliability, and COVID-19 Pandemic on Digital Banking Effectiveness: Analysis Using Technology Acceptance Model

by Erlane K. Ghani, Mazurina Mohd Ali, Muhammad Nazmy Rezzaimy Musa and Akrom A. Omonov

Sustainability 2022, 14(18), 11248; https://doi.org/10.3390/su141811248 - 08 Sep 2022

Cited by 7 | Viewed by 4583

Abstract

This study examined the digital banking effectiveness of a bank. This study specifically explored the effect of perceived usefulness, banking system reliability, and COVID-19 pandemic on the digital banking effectiveness of a bank in Malaysia based on the technology acceptance model (TAM). Data collection was undertaken using a questionnaire survey involving 228 clients of the bank. The findings indicated that two of the chosen factors, namely, perceived usefulness and reliability of the banking system, significantly influenced digital banking effectiveness. On the other hand, the findings also showed that the COVID-19 pandemic did not influence digital banking effectiveness, per the bank clients’ perspective. The study’s findings provide insight into the future financial direction and addresses consumers’ financial needs. In addition, the findings help develop an overview of the industry based on one of the prominent financial institutions in Malaysia. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Accounting and Sustainability Reporting in the COVID-19 Pandemic: New Trends and Development)

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Review

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17 pages, 896 KiB

Open AccessReview

A Systematic Literature Review on ESG during the COVID-19 Pandemic

by Riccardo Savio, Edoardo D’Andrassi and Francesca Ventimiglia

Sustainability 2023, 15(3), 2020; https://doi.org/10.3390/su15032020 - 20 Jan 2023

Cited by 12 | Viewed by 7675

Abstract

Environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues have been investigated by scholars from several points of view. Although the epidemic of COVID-19 is recent, numerous scholars have analyzed its effects on ESG, making it difficult to systematize current knowledge. This generates the risk that the discussion will become stale. This study aims to provide a systematic literature review able to examine the combination of ESG and COVID-19 outbreak, to understand what the academics discovered. Eighty-five studies were systematically reviewed. We used a systematic literature review which is the tool that can ensure that all relevant data from the topic under investigation are considered. This approach is considered as the most comprehensive and rigorous one because it allows the creation of the advancement of knowledge of the specific topic. We identified five classes plus a residual one that accommodate the main topics analyzed in the literature (investment and stock returns, ESG in specific industries, ESG rating, gender studies, ESG reporting, and other). Our research highlights that most of the studies have been focused on the first three topics, sometimes reaching different or opposite findings, while only few studies have been dedicated on the other topics. Therefore, we state the need for more research into the ESG/COVID-19 combination in the fields of gender diversity and ESG reporting, and for more research able to understand the different findings of the other three identified topics. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Accounting and Sustainability Reporting in the COVID-19 Pandemic: New Trends and Development)

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