Sustainability performance efficiency in the banking sector

Abstract

Traditional sustainability reporting is based on an internally developed methodology and does not fully cope with the sustainability performance evaluation, especially from an external perspective. This study aims to fill this gap by offering a tool that may be used to assess the company’s performance based on the results presented to external users. For this purpose, a two-stage data envelopment analysis (DEA) is proposed, that enables a comparison of the sustainability performance disclosed in non-financial reports in the banking industry in Poland, Croatia, and Romania. The findings of our study identify differences between the efficiency of sustainability performance in the banking sectors of all three countries. The proposed approach to compare hard-to-compare sustainability performance may significantly contribute to the decision-making process for stakeholders and, therefore, to the advancement of sustainability performance measurement research.

Keywords:

• Sustainability
• performance
• efficiency
• banking
• sustainability reporting
• sustainability disclosure

JEL CLASSIFICATIONS:

• M40; M41; M49

Data availability statement

The data supporting this study’s findings are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Additional information

Funding

The research is partially supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency [the project APVV No. APVV-16-0602 “Enhancement of the relevance of the accounting data in the SR - from expenses to value”] and VEGA No. 1/0047/23 The importance of spatial spill over effects in the context of the EU's greener and carbon-free Europe priority.