The Assessment of The Companies' Sustainable Development Performance

At present, the content of sustainability reports tends to appear in forms and units that are not easy to convert in comparable unitary terms. We have advanced the design of a composite index of sustainable development that would evaluate the performance of the companies as a time function and that would ensure the integration of sustainable development indicators in a relevant and useful manner.The proposed model is wished to be an advance in the assessment of the sustainability of companies. We have used the simulation method, and the impact of every indicator on the global sustainability of the company was determined with the technique of analytic hierarchy process. The model refers to the fashion in which the environmental, economic and social indicators can be associated in sub-indexes and finally in a global index of the company's performance.The results of the proposed model show that it is feasible and easy to apply at company level, although, none of the ways to express quantitatively such a complex concept as sustainable development could not be perfect. The disadvantage of the model would be that the fashion the weights of the indicators are determined is not direct and precise. © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. Selection and/ peer-review under responsibility of Academic World Research and Education Center.