@article{2025:ruffingstraube:value_crea,
title = {Value Creation Reporting for Sustainable Development – Is Sustainability Information Integrated with Financial Information?},
year = {2025},
note = {The transition to more sustainable economic development is at the
heart of the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development by the United
Nations. This leads to a broader definition of value that integrates
social and environmental aspects alongside economic value. In this
paper, we derive a structure for the analysis of reporting on
sustainable value creation based on actual reporting decisions.
Structuring the disclosures on sustainable value creation focuses on
presentation, integration, measurement and aggregation. We further
provide descriptive evidence on firms’ reporting decisions on
sustainable value creation by manually analysing the reports of the 20
largest Swiss companies from 2013–2022 and the 2022 reports of the
50 largest EU listed companies. The analysis suggests a substantial
increase in reporting on sustainable value creation over time with
slightly more than 50% of firms reporting on sustainable value
creation in 2022. Firms tend to report in visual form and focus on
prior year realizations of measures in the environmental and social
areas. Firms’ impacts and dependencies on people and planet are
vaguely integrated with financial considerations and dependencies are
rarely addressed. Aggregated or forward-looking measures are largely
missing.},
journal = {Swiss Journal of Business},
pages = {418--453},
author = {Ruffing-Straube, Patricia and Olivito, Saverio},
volume = {79},
number = {4}
}