Sustainability Reporting Pattern in Pharmaceutical Sector : A Study of Top 10 Economies across the Globe

Abstract

Sustainability reporting is now a mainstream activity of global corporations and is an important issue of the decade. Transparency and accountability for stakeholders are most demanding issues in pharmaceutical sectors. Companies or Industries can’t survive without sustainable growth. Since, most of the stakeholders are aware of recent problems such as community health, climate change, education and development, business sustainability etc., the demand for disclosures in these areas have also been remarkably increased. Global companies have started reporting on sustainability disclosure for both economic and non-economic activities such as Triple Bottom Line (TBL) reporting along with accountability of external and internal stakeholders towards the goal of sustainable development. This paper examines the sustainability reporting practices of pharmaceutical companies of top 10 economies across the globe. For this purpose, sustainability reports of pharmaceutical companies of top 10 economies based on Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and Non- GRI guidelines for 5 years (2012 to 2016) were collected from the GRI-Database. The number of pharmaceutical companies along with country name that published sustainability reports has been classified into four categories such as companies with GRI reports published for 5 years, less than 5 years, Non-GRI reports and mixed reports (GRI &Non-GRI) a total number of sustainability reports published in the given time period were compiled and analyzed. The results revealed that the sustainability disclosures in Pharmaceutical sector are basically dominated by the countries like USA, Brazil, and China whereas, least performing in sustainability disclosure parameter are Canada, Italy, Germany and India.