Research pick: All about the biz? More trouble! - "Evaluating sustainable development goals through market capitalisation: where we are half way and future research ahead"

A study in the World Review of Entrepreneurship, Management and Sustainable Development has considered the extent to which the private sector has engaged with the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The work casts some doubt on whether multinational corporations are truly aligning their operations with the global effort to combat poverty, inequality, and climate change.

The researchers looked at corporate financial data across 74 countries, including 26 developed and 48 emerging economies, and found that market capitalisation, a common measure of corporate financial value based on share prices, was negatively correlated with most of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Those goals were purportedly adopted in 2015 and form a comprehensive framework that was to achieve social, environmental, and economic sustainability by 2030.

In practical terms, the work suggests that many companies increase their value not by advancing these goals but by finding ways to circumvent them. Indeed, only a small subset of the goals, specifically those related to health, education, clean water, infrastructure, responsible consumption, and international cooperation, showed a positive relationship with corporate financial success.

The researchers refer to this selective engagement as those companies taking a transactional approach to sustainability. Rather than embracing sustainability as a core principle, many firms appear to treat it as a branding exercise or a compliance measure, greenwashing is a much-discussed problem, for instance. Companies that are undertaking such practices only to enhance their reputation or satisfy regulatory expectations are not leading us towards sustainability. It could be that it is not simply a few “bad actors” but a systemic malignancy in global business. The problem is even more stark in emerging economies, where resource constraints and immediate financial pressures often stymie investment in long-term sustainable development.

With just five years remaining, goals that do not directly serve the interests of shareholders, such as gender equality, climate action, and poverty alleviation, have been, to a large extent, marginalised or ignored altogether. The researchers argue that this must change urgently. They call for transformative development and a major change in corporate behaviour, underpinned by policymakers developing stronger frameworks to encourage full-spectrum engagement with all the UN’s goals.

Arana-Barbier, P.J. (2025) ‘Evaluating sustainable development goals through market capitalisation: where we are half way and future research ahead’, World Review of Entrepreneurship, Management and Sustainable Development, Vol. 21, No. 2, pp.1–22.