The Sustainable Firm: Long-Run Performance and Corporate Social Responsibility

Abstract

The sustainability of development has been studied, so far, almost exclusively in macroeconomic terms. The development of an economy in its usual macroeconomic sense, however, is sustainable only if the activity of most firms operating within the economy is itself sustainable. It is thus not less important to study the microeconomic side of sustainability. Hence we introduce in this chapter the concept of “sustainable firm” in order to discuss under which conditions a company may survive healthily in the long term. To be as precise as possible we focus on the most important type of firm in industrialized countries: the corporation.