Environmental, Social and Governance Considerations into Investment Decisions: Current State and Future Directions

Abstract

The increasing global emphasis on sustainable development, both inside and outside the organization has led to the adoption of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) factors into business practices. The stakeholders are now increasingly incorporating ESG aspects into their investment decisions to achieve long-term returns and move closer towards sustainability. Research on ESG practices has increased over the past two decades, however the overview of the topic is still insufficient. Therefore, to understand the current state of the ESG practices, this study reviews and summarizes a corpus data of 2,434 documents on ESG literature focusing on ESG investments, published from 1991 to 2024, which were retrieved from Scopus database. The analysis was performed using VOS Viewer and Bibliometrix package by R software, which provides a graphical representation of the data. This study provides a comprehensive overview of current state of ESG literature by emphasizing on the emerging areas and trends in publications, most occurring keywords, prominent authors, citation and co-citation analysis, co-authorship analysis. The limitation of using only a single database for collecting and analyzing the data is acknowledged which also adds up for the future research. This study enhances the review quality by pointing the researchers towards the future research directions in the area of ESG.