INTERNATIONALIZATION OF COMPANIES AND ESG PERFORMANCE:
AN ANALYSIS OF BRAZIL’S PUBLIC COMPANIES
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.4270/ruc.2025101Keywords:
Internationalization, Sustainability, ESG, Stakeholder TheoryAbstract
Faced with the dynamic panorama of global markets and the growing demands of stakeholders, companies have intensified their focus on issues related to sustainability. Furthermore, the international normative and regulatory framework related to sustainability establishes a context in which companies need to align their internationalization strategies with ESG principles. In this environment, internationalization can lead organizations to reinforce their attention and commitment to ESG practices. Supported by Stakeholder Theory, the study investigates the influence of internationalization on the ESG performance (aggregate, environmental, social, and governance) of publicly traded Brazilian companies, considering the five-year period 2017-2021. The quantitative research identified that, in 2021, the group of companies operating in the international market through share trading showed better ESG performance. It was found, however, that the more the company internationalizes through trading its shares on foreign stock exchanges, the lower its ESG (aggregate, environmental and social) performance is, suggesting that Brazilian companies do not implement these practices when operating in global capital markets. Furthermore, governance performance was not significant in any of the statistical models, indicating that internationalized companies do not adopt governance structures designed to acquire reliability from their stakeholders and attract new investors, contradicting the assumptions of Stakeholder Theory.
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