Conciliating environmental and financial performance in emerging countries

We evaluate the relationship between environmentally sustainable conduct – on the whole Pillar E (e_score) and broken down into the three sub-pillars: environmental emission, resource use and environmental product innovation – of Chinese companies and their economic and financial performance (FP) through an analysis on 3,550 firm-year observations in the period 2010–2022. The results confirm hypotheses, showing statistically significant coefficients related to all the four independent variables: e_score, emission, resource_use, and product_innovation. Findings are corroborated by conducting robustness test. It can be inferred that also in the most important emerging country from a financial point of view a new business architype can be modelled, in which investors are addressed towards a more cognizant meaning of finance, in which they try to reconcile economic performances with environmental impact of their decision-making process.