Integrating sustainability factors into investment decision-making process

Abstract

Purpose: to approach of integration of sustainability issues into institutional investors’ investment decision-making process. Discussion: the paper investigates the most widespread approaches to integrate sustainability issues into investment decision-making process, applied both by the national and global scientific and business communities. The paper analyzes advantages and disadvantages of these approaches and offers recommendations regarding their development and enhancement in order to provide for further integration of sustainability issues. Results: the paper proves that to assure successful integration of sustainability issues, methodological guidance that provides recommendations on integration of sustainability issues on each stage of investment decision-making process is required. Such guidance needs to be adapted to respective economic sectors and should describe approaches to define the most relevant sustainability factors for the economic actor and integrate them into financial models, instruments of scenario analysis and other instruments used in investment analysis, providing the opportunity for integrated assessment of financial and non-financial factors.