A comparative study on drivers for corporate environmental responsibility, EU15 vs. EU-NMS13

Abstract

The activity of enterprises has a major impact on the quality of the environment. Deterioration and abusive exploitation of resources, with no concern for environmental protection, bring the need for a higher level of corporate environmental responsibility (CER). Consequently, CER has become a sine qua non concern of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). This study aims to estimate the importance of drivers for CER. It was conducted on a sample of SMEs from two groups of EU countries characterised by a different level of social and economic development backgrounds. The authors applied statistical analysis to estimate the importance of the effect of drivers for CER using the logit model and the nomogram. The logit model shows that the most important effects of drivers for CER correspond to the company's core values, the impact of resource efficiency actions on the production costs, and the return on the investments made on resource efficiency. The magnitude of these effects is different for the SMEs from the two EU groups. Also, the study underlines the significant effect of SMEs' size for CER. The differences for the two groups of countries call for policies stimulating environmental responsibility, differentiated by the two types of SMEs.