Assessing the Benefits of the Sustainability Reporting Practices in the Top Romanian Companies

The concept of sustainability reporting has been addressed by experts worldwide and is defined as the process of communicating the social and environmental effects of the economic actions of organizations to special interest groups within society in general. The main purpose of this research was to identify and analyze the opinions of the real benefits obtained by large companies in Romania following the elaboration of sustainability reports and their contribution to the development of a sustainable economy. A quantitative marketing research was carried out on the sample randomly extracted from a target community of the largest 5750 companies across 35 counties that were active in strategic priority areas of Romania. Both explicitly and implicitly, the research resulted in essential aspects related to the correlation of the sustainability strategy with sustainability reporting, how sustainable development goals contribute to improving all of the processes included in the integrated company management system, how the internal and external benefits can contribute to increasing economic, social, and environmental performance, and building sustainable relationships with shareholders, employees, and stakeholders. In addition, the findings show that aligning a sustainability strategy with a global business strategy and including sustainability reporting requirements (non-financial) are important concerns at the level of the top companies in Romania.