Sustainability

Topic: Sustainability Sustainability is one of the challenges facing humanity today. This is reflected in the development of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) included in the 2030 Agenda, announced and approved at the Summit on Sustainable Development in September 2015, as well as in one of the four universal apostolic preferences of the company of Jesus promulgated by Father General Arturo Sosa on February 19, 2019: "Take care of our common home. To work, with evangelical depth, to protect and renew God's Creation". Although sustainability is still mainly associated with its environmental component, it includes other crucial aspects, such as the economic and social components. Businesses are one of the main actors responsible for achieving Sustainable Development Goals. Business leaders are increasingly aware of the power of sustainable business strategies not only to address the world's most pressing challenges but also to drive the success of their companies. However, defining what sustainability means, setting clear and achievable goals and formulating a strategy to achieve them can be daunting. Therefore, Business Administration degree students should be informed and conscious of the impact of their business management on sustainability in its triple bottom (social, economic and environmental). For this reason, this study analyses the value of the named extra-financial criteria known as ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance), which try to measure the environmental and social impact of business on their stakeholders in a significant group of companies in the Bloomberg database during the last years (2018-2021). The Environmental factor (E) refers to the impact that the development of the corporate purpose of a company can generate on the environment. At the same time, the Social factor (S) examines how the company manages relationships with employees, suppliers, customers and the communities where it operates. Finally, the Governance factor (G) considers a company's ability to organize its internal structure. This paper aims to contribute to the knowledge of this issue by means of an empirical analysis. Concretely, this research will use descriptive and inferential statistics to aim for the overall objective of quantifying the weight and time evolution of the components of these ESG criteria in a sample of more than 1000 international companies. This will allow us to identify the profiles (size, sector, development level of the country where they are located, among others) of those firms with the highest/lowest sustainability standards, finding the main significant differences between them. At the same time, the association between ESG criteria and other financial and economic firms' ratios will be studied to test the relationship between economic profitability and sustainable development. Key words: Sustainability, management, ESG criteria, SDGs, triple bottom of sustainability.