Sustainable Development and SDGs of Agenda 2030. An empirical analysis on group of Italian listed companies

Sustainable development in all its aspects represents, to date, one of the greatest challenges that every country is called to face. A change is needed which must involve the way institutions and choices are responsible for producing, consuming and acting. The new model of sustainable development requires a reconversion of production processes by companies that can use a variety of strategies and aids for the realization of sustainable development (Albino et al., 2009). As suggested by the literature, among the disclosures the sustainability report provides a series of information that helps to achieve a contribution from each sustainability company and the SDGs (Bebbington and Unerman, 2018; García-Sanchez et al., 2020). This paper, after a brief theoretical framework on the analysis of the literature, aims to analyze the dissemination of sustainability and SDGs of a group of Italian listed companies. The purpose of the research is to verify whether the information on sustainability in the listed companies in the sample is in line with the SDGs and if there is a positive relationship between sustainable information (in its three areas: economic, social and environmental) and the performance of each individual agency. The data will be collected through the content analysis that will be carried out on the sustainability reports, for the two-year period 2018-2020, of 49 companies listed on the Italian Stock Exchange, belonging to the Industry sector. The choice of analysis by companies in the industrial sector is because, as confirmed by various studies, they are particularly sensitive to the disclosure of sustainability and the SDGS.