Evaluation of Environmental Impact and Responsibility of Russian Largest Companies

The research is devoted to the assessment of Russian largest corporations by market capitalization from the point of view of the environmental aspects of their activity. Worldwide community's attention to impact of the business on environment has enhanced recently. There is a great demand for information confirming that business, first of all a large one, can become responsible for global steady growth by balancing three components of sustainable development: economic, social and ecological. This research is focused on evaluation of environmental issues by using a number of ecological indicators common for all extracting, production and financial companies. The methodology of research is based on principal component analysis, which is widely used in multidimensional statistics. The whole set of principal components with weighting coefficients equal to the proportions of the corresponding explained variance we used as an aggregate measure of various ecological indicators. This approach let us to avoid any expert assessments in construction of a rating. Rating is applicable for evaluation of the companies' efforts in construction of environmentally-friendly business model.