Análise comparativa dos valores de ações de empresas com e sem responsabilidade social configurada: um enfoque em empresas florestais brasileiras

Abstract

This research aims to analyze whether investments of Brazilian forestry companies, concerning activities that shape social responsibility, are reflected in the values of their shares. Its context is that of sustainable development or sustainability, that is, a social paradigm about the possibility of achieving economic development, within the logic of expansion and accumulation, without greatly compromising the natural resources for future generations. The relevance of this research lies in the importance of the topic in the present days, in seeking to assess a company beyond its financial and economic aspects and in to proposing indicators that relate such aspects with those of social responsibility. The present investigation was limited to Brazilian forestry companies, listed on the BM&FBOVESPA, in May of 2012. The social responsibility of these companies was described by the indicators proposed by the Global Reporting Initiative and covered the following aspects: environmental, human rights, labor practices and decent work, society, product liability and economic. Such description was restricted to the period of 2009 and 2010. The results showed that only five out of nine surveyed companies had prepared sustainability reports within the period aforementioned. For a society that wants to achieve sustainability this scenario is rather disturbing, as such companies represent the elite stratum of the universe of Brazilian forestry companies. On its turn, the analysis of the investigated companies’ financial economic evaluation indexes was carried out from data obtained in their financial reports from 2009 to 2011. These data were analyzed by means of multivariate statistical techniques, especially the factor analysis, which scored 17 relevant indexes among the 25 most widely used ones concerning a company’s financial and economic evaluation. Regarding share values, the research findings highlight that among the Brazilian forestry companies that were investigated, the ones with configured social responsibility were better suited to stay in business, had greater transparency in their production practices and offered lower risk to investors compared to those without configured social responsibility. Furthermore, at the current stage of the Brazilian social and economic development, sustainability reports must no longer be taken as mere trade recommendations, as they nurture new ways of thinking and acting over society. They have to be supervised by the government and, consequently, understood as mandatory instruments of reference to grant public funds.