Sustainability and non-financial disclosure: a poset’s approach

Abstract

In recent decades, sustainability has become one of the main aspects of Non-Financial Disclosure (NFD), a type of mandatory reporting for large companies in terms of turnover and number of employees, reporting on social and environmental aspects. There are currently many metrics to evaluate this aspect, but in most cases, they are not suitable for addressing a phenomenon of such great importance in a timely and truthful manner. The relevance of the subject has a counterpart of a methodological nature since the assessment of well-being involves the use of complex systems of ordinal variables. This impacts on the evaluation process, because it calls into question the methodological paradigm with which this type of problem is usually faced. The statistical analysis carried out is based on two extremely important phases: both manual and computerized content analysis and the Partial Order Set. The sample defined by Consob, in compliance with Legislative Decree no. 254 of December 30th 2016, is made up of 204 Italian companies obliged to register non-financial communication in 2020. The results obtained show that the methodology used has been able to better grasp the multiple characteristics of the phenomenon, without underestimating the individual companies in terms of different discussion of aspects related to sustainability.