Corporate sustainability and performance: An efficiency perspective

The growing attention to corporate sustainability has favoured the emergence of paradigms aimed at understanding the interaction between the economic and the environmental sustainability dimensions. While a win-win paradigm initially arose basically aimed at emphasizing the potential synergies between these two objectives, an alternative vision based on a logic of trade-off has subsequently emerged, foreseeing that improvement in one perspective can often be harmful to the other. Focusing on the EU energy production industry, this study adopts a data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach with the aim to assess whether mutual impact there exists between the economic and the environmental sides reflecting a win-win or a trade-off relationship. Furthermore, as prioritizing sustainability indicators has been recognized in the ongoing debate as a useful way to build effective sustainability practices, our assessment of the mutual impact accommodates the possibility that the resulting evidence may change when priority is placed, alternatively, to the economic or the environmental sustainability concern. The results show how the environmental goal enters in a trade-off relationship with the economic one when priority is placed on the environmental dimension. This casts doubts on the feasibility of a spontaneous path towards the strengthening of renewable sources.