SUSTAINABILITY REPORTING IN EUROPEAN UNION COMPANIES

Promoting and incorporating the concept of sustainable development and social responsibility into corporate operations and stakeholders' growing demands for non-financial information, have conditioned the emergence of sustainability reporting. Specifically, stakeholders arc louder and louder in the requirement that external reports contain, in addition to financial indicators, criteria related to the environment and society, in order to be able to assess the efficiency of company management and the company's care for the environment and society in which it operates. In line with the above, the main research objective in this paper is to identify possible differences in the number of published reports between old and new EU members, companies of different sizes, and companies from different sectors. Empirical research uses limited version of online Global Reporting Initiative database. Data analysis is done using primarily descriptive statistics and non-parametric tests. The research results point to a statistically significant difference in the number of published sustainability reports between old and new-EU members, as well as that the great influence on report publication comes from sector affiliation and the company size. The main research conclusion is that legal, political, and economic situation in the country affects the number of published sustainability reports.