ESG efficiency analysis in the IT industry : a DEA-based approach

Unlocking the power of sustainable growth, Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) principles are redefining the future of responsible investment and corporate excellence. ESG regulations ensure that organizations maintain sustainable development and improve non-monetary metrics, such as stakeholders' engagement, customer satisfaction, market acceptability, societal ethics, and values. Higher ESG scores demonstrate commitment towards responsible business practices and indicate higher market value for companies, which are valid for all sectors, including IT. However, existing literature reveals that IT sector companies pay less attention to planning their operations to make them more sustainable. Therefore, IT firms must identify methods and practices to maintain high ESG scores to achieve sustainable growth. The current study leads the readers into a new area of ESG through the help of an advanced method, DEA. DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) methodology has been used to identify the decision units' relative efficiency scores and helps identify peers and followers based on ESG scores. The study reveals that among the selected IT firms using the output-oriented strategy, 56.25% experience increasing returns to scale, 18.75 per cent experience decreasing returns to scale, and the remaining 25.00 per cent report constant returns to scale. This indicates that most IT industry firms can generate greater output change in proportion to the input change.