An Analysis of the Progress of Japanese Companies’ Commitment to the SDGs and Their Economic Systems and Social Activities for Communities

Abstract

Japanese companies are making rapid progress in addressing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and there is growing interest in the relationship between these goals and financial performance. Moreover, the promotion of the SDGs at the local level encourages opportunities for collaboration with companies. This study analyzed the relationship between the status of SDG efforts and the financial data, as well as social activity data of 533 Japanese manufacturing companies from 2016 to 2020. In terms of academic contribution, this study provides a unique case study in Japan, with consideration of the timing of the initiation of SDG efforts. The results showed that large companies and companies with high profitability tended to start working on the SDGs at an early stage. The results of a comparison of industries showed that the timing of the initiation of SDG initiatives is not affected by profitability in the food and electrical equipment sectors, where SDG efforts are already well underway. From the results of multiple regression analysis, it was found that large companies with high profitability that have implemented social activities tend to be early adopters of the SDGs. The results of this analysis suggest that it is important to design measures that are appropriate based on the size of the focal company and that social contribution activities should be incentivized to encourage companies to act on the SDGs.

A Drivers Framework of Organizational SDG Engagement

“…Moreover, the limited existing organizational-level research uses a variety of different concepts for a seemingly very similar process, often consisting of several SDG-related actions, activities, and policies such as SDG prioritization and SDG reporting. These range from organizational SDG engagement [15,18,47], organizational SDG commitment [48], organizational SDG integration [49], and even also organizational SDG implementation [4,50]. Therefore, at this moment, it appears that several organizational SDG concepts are ambiguous concepts that are neither well-defined nor positioned.…”

In what measure do non-financial information statements help in measuring the contribution to the sustainable development goals of companies? Case study of companies in Gipuzkoa

“…Regarding the second point of view, at an international level, special importance is given to the analysis of the relationship between financial performance and impact on the SDGs (Ikuta & Fujii, 2022;Lodhia et al, 2022;Mishra, 2021).…”

Why do companies participate in climate change‐related initiatives? Theoretical and empirical analyses of motivations for Japanese companies

“…We then extracted a set of questions that would provide the status of a company's environmental behavior from the Directory of CSR Corporations. This directory is a database that has been frequently used for CSR research in Japanese companies (Amann et al, 2012; Ikuta & Fujii, 2022) and is also replete with information related to climate change. The Directory of CSR Corporations contains data on more than 1600 companies and 500 questions, but there are items for which many companies have not responded or for which no questions existed in past versions of the survey.…”