1st ICAI 2020

International Conference on Automotive Industry 2020

Mladá Boleslav, Czech Republic

to each other, they have similar profiles and vice versa; (c) The longer a criterion vector (axis), the more discriminating criterion and vice versa; (d) Criteria which express similar preferences have similar directions and vice versa. It is worth noting that each projection loses a part of information. Thus, one must be careful, if this loss does not bring wrong results and what part of the total information is preserved in the projection (usually expressed in %). 3.2 Input data The input data for the study were taken from the United Nations (UN) Global Compact database. The UN Global Compact is a non-binding UN pact launched in 2000 and the world’s largest corporate sustainability initiative, which supports companies to (United Nations Global Compact, 2020): (1) Do business responsibly by aligning their strategies and operations with Ten Principles on human rights, labour, environment and anti-corruption; and (2) Take strategic actions to advance broader societal goals, such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals, with an emphasis on collaboration and innovation. The database provides sustainability information and documents about almost 14,000 participants (companies and non-business signatories) from 155 countries around the world. The participants are divided into 19 sectors. The study is based on the Automobiles & Parts sector, which contains 165 active participants. Each participant must submit to the database the Communication on Progress (COP) that represents an annual disclosure through which a business informs stakeholders about its efforts to implement the principles of the UNGlobal Compact (UnitedNations Global Compact, 2013). One part of the COP is related to the SDGs. Participants should answer the following question: “Which of the following Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) do the activities described in your COP address?”. In this way, companies declare which SDGs they are helping to meet through their activities. In the studied sector, 127 companies provided answers to this question. The binary values was obtained on this basis. It is worth noting that the preferences, which we used for our analysis, were declared by the companies in the past and do not necessarily coincide with the preferences expressed in the current management of the companies. The division of companies in terms of continents is as follows: Europe – 67 companies (53.76%), Asia – 34 companies (26.77%), America – 21 companies (16.54%), and Africa – 5 companies (3.94%). This shows that the number of companies from Africa is not statistically significant enough, which must be taken into account when interpreting the results. To get the performance values for the continents, we used the arithmetic mean of binary values, i.e. the relative frequency with which the companies in the particular continent follows the given SDG (e.g., the value of 0.5 means that half of companies in the continent follows the SDG and the second half not). The resulting input data are provided in Table 1.

171