Sustainability: a comparision between Europe and Japan

Abstract

The thesis is aimed at discovering which are the latest trends and the best practices of sustainability focusing on two different countries: Europe and Japan. The objective of sustainability is to meet the needs of the present generation without weakening the possibility of future generation to meet their needs. The subject does not concern only environment, but the social and governance dimensions are included as well. As a consequence, firstly it is important to discover which are the global indications given by the major organizations that regulate sustainable development. The analysed regulations mainly focus in recent years because sustainability has a strong connection with technology and innovation, fields in continuous development. It must be said that every country has a different background due to its political, social and geographical context. In order to better understand which are the differences between the two countries, it is dutiful to analyse the national guidelines concerning sustainability and, in general, non – financial reporting. Starting from the regulation imposed by the national governance and continuing with a detailed analysis of two comparable case studies, the project presented here has the goal to highlight which are the major differences between Japan and Europe’s approach to a sustainable development. An in-depth analysis of the sustainability report of the two companies allows to know the concept of sustainable finance, which are the different best practices and how the Corporate Social Responsibility is managed. The resulting analysis provides the opportunity to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of the two different approaches and to give an ambitious evidence of which are the actual weaknesses.