Business Sustainability Assessment: Comparing Results of Two Studies

Business sustainability assessment requires data, which can be gathered from various information sources. Annual statements are frequently used as a data source, because they are considered to be one of the most important means of the company to communicate with various stakeholders. The document is signed by the management of the company, ensuring that the information in the statement is accurate, and because the statements are audited by an independent third party. The research was intended to solve the problem of the lack of information about the content of Lithuanian companies' annual statements from the perspective of corporate sustainability assessment. Thus, two studies were executed, first analysing annual statements of 15 companies, the second analysing the remaining annual statements of 23 companies, to build understanding of what information is available for further studies of business sustainability assessment. The studies encompassed 38 Lithuanian companies, listed in the Baltic main and secondary lists in Vilnius market in NASDAQ OMX, which constituted 100% of companies. As the studies were done in the beginning of 2010, annual statements for 2008 were used. The methods of the research were logical literature analysis, computer assisted quantitative content analysis, comparative analysis. The first part of the paper reviews the research of Lithuanian scientists in the field of sustainable development, and more specifically, various business and industry sectors. The literature review also includes various business sustainability evaluation models, focussing on the structure of the models, the quantity of companies analysed and the sources of data, used in the evaluations. In the second parts of the paper, the model of business sustainability evaluation is briefly described to create the basic structure for the research of annual statements of the companies. The third part describes the methodology of the research: what data was analysed, how it was analysed, the structure of the research. In the fourth part of the article, the results of the study are presented, explaining what information was most often found in the annual statements and how frequently it was found. Eventually, the findings are discussed from the perspective of whether the availability of information is satisfactory to execute corporate sustainability assessment. The model for business sustainability assessment, used in this study, is based on the idea, that companies have a