Sweden knows how to do business while taking climate change, gender, human rights and anticorruption into account. According to the non-profit organisations AccountAbility, which aims to promote accountability innovations for sustainable development, Sweden leads the world in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).
The AccountAbility‘s Responsible Competitiveness Index (RCI) ranks Sweden as the country that is doing most to advance its business competitiveness through responsible business practices, ahead of Denmark, Finland, Iceland and the United Kingdom .
In 2007, Swedish business magazine Veckans Affärer highlighted the growing importance of environmental and social responsibility to Swedish companies in a survey of 100 large corporations. Eighty-eight percent of the companies said their work with CSR issues had increased. The main areas of focus were “Climate and Environment” (81%) and “Being a good employer” (78%).”
Moreover, according to the Swedish Agency for Economic and Regional Growth (Tillväxtverket), Sweden has the highest number of environmentally certified companies, and it is the leader country in terms of numbers of certifies companies per millions inhabitants. The survey took into account the companies certified under the widely used environmental management system ISO 14001.
As a matter of fact, Sweden was the first country to require sustainability reports from state-owned companies. It is just one example of how seriously Sweden takes CSR. In 2002, after the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs encourages Swedish companies’ work on human rights, basic working conditions, combating corruption and a better environment. The starting point is the international conventions and standards for companies, which are formulated in the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises and the UN Global Compact, as well as the core conventions of the International Labour Organization (ILO), the UN‘s specialized agency for employment and workplace issues.
To find out more: www.sweden.se → http://www.sweden.se/eng/Home/Business/CSR/Reading/Sweden-CSR/.To see the whole list drawn up by AccountAbility: http://www.accountability21.net/uploadedFiles/Conference/RCI%20_2007.pdf; to view the full Report The State of Responsible Competitiveness, go to http://www.accountability21.net/uploadedFiles/publications/The%20State%20of%20Responsible%20Competitiveness.pdf.
