Sustainability Reporting in the Mining and Metals Sector: An Investigation of 25 Steel and 25 Mining Companies

Globalization driven further by innovations in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), transportation and the World Wide Web has tremendously changed the traditional economic development policies and practices. With globalization of production (outsourcing, off-shoring and Foreign Direct Investment - FDI) and globalization of markets, more and more companies embarked upon trans-boundary operations, and thus the name multinational corporations. Unprecedented economic gains have been reaped by shareholders of companies, but often at the cost of sustainable development. This has led to the need for companies and organizations to provide their performance reports to stakeholders, and thus step up their corporate responsibilities on the social and environmental dimensions as well. This paper looks into the reporting efforts of 25 global mining and 25 global steel companies. Five sample companies have been selected from the two categories, and their performance reports evaluated on the core dimensions of sustainable development: social, economic and environmental.