Non-financial disclosures and sustainable development: A scientometric analysis

Abstract

Pressure on companies to report on non-financial dimensions has amplified the interest in sustainability due to increased awareness among stakeholders. While connecting value-related success to financial performance is a niche field among academicians and researchers, the debate is still on “Does it matter the going value of non-financial disclosures (NFD) relevant?” To clarify ambiguous perceptions in existing literature, we examine how NFD connects to sustainable development by conducting an in-depth scientometric analysis to gain insights into evolution, trends, and other multi-dimensional aspects to map centralities and bursts in non-financial sustainability indicators. We used bibliometric data from a pool of 1568 studies from Web of Science published in Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) and Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) journals between 1991 and 2021 to identify the prominent research areas in this stream and the pattern of the interrelationship among various disciplines. The current investigation reveals several novel features of ESG disclosures, such as corporate sustainable performance, environmental performance, environmental disclosures, sustainable supply chains, sustainability indicators, and integrated reporting. This study highlights bottlenecks and suggests the scope of future research on Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) to meet sustainable business goals. The findings of this study include 13 major clusters refining ESG for sustainability, concluding with a new theory encapsulating sustainable development through non-financial disclosure in business processes. This study has significant practical implications on the ESG dimension in the corporate world of emerging countries are under the development stage.