Interestingly, the social and environmental sections contain supplier assessments which look at the labor, human rights, environmental, and societal impacts at the supplier levels. This information allows to specifically take into account sustainability issues in the supply chains of multinationals.

This analysis focuses on those measures of the inclusive development targets (Appendix 1) that are fully or partially captured by GRI measures. The disclaimers are as follows:

- The information is taken from the G4 Reports with a declared “in accordance” option<sup>8</sup> that have been included in the GRI Sustainability Disclosure Database.

- G4 Reports are sustainability/integrated reports based on the GRI G4 Sustainability Reporting Guidelines for which there is a GRI Content Index available.

- When analyzing these G4 Reports, only the reporting claims made in the GRI Content Index have been taken into account; further information such as assurance statements, content of the report, etc., has not been analyzed.

- The sample size: 2,020 G4 reports published in 2015, from 81 countries, located in six world regions, with “in accordance” options Core and Comprehensive (see footnote 7).<sup>9</sup>

- The data available in the database are collected by GRI in collaboration with its data partners and capture all reports of which GRI is aware.

While GRI collects meta‐data about sustainability reports, it has not manually extracted actual reported information (e.g., numbers, percentages, answers) from the reports. Our analysis, thus, has to be based on whether or not companies have disclosed any information on their economic, social, environmental and governance impacts and, by definition, uses binary variables.

This analysis focuses on firms that entirely or partially report information. Table 1 lists the 12 different response options in the second column as constructed by GRI. Following GRI’s suggestion, they can be aggregated up into five response categories (first column). The average distribution across all 54 indicators suggests that most responses fall under the categories “reported entirely” (42.5%) and “not addressed” (53.1%), while less than 5% of disclosures fall into other response categories (last column). The focus of this analysis is on the percentage of firms that entirely or partially disclosed any information.

A higher disclosure rate for certain types of firms could reflect both voluntary and mandatory disclosures. First, firms could have an incentive to voluntarily disclose some type of information, e.g. because they follow a corporate social responsibility (CSR) business model or because this is common practice for their industry, region or type of firm. Second, firms could also disclose information because it is mandatory, i.e. regulations require them to report certain issues which, again could be sector‐, region, or type‐specific.

> 8 The “in accordance” system is a way that firms can indicate the degree of alignment they have with the GRI Guidelines (as of October 19, 2016 Standards). It also is an indication of breadth of transparency, i.e. if more or fewer indicators are reported. There are many reports that do not self‐declare one of these “core“ or “comprehensive“ options, but do report against GRI metrics and/or use a GRI content index. GRI has introduced a new option “GRI‐referenced claim“ in the new GRI Standards to allow these firms to more accurately declare their use of the Standards.

> 9 The full 2015 data set as of January 19, 2017 contains 5,748 sustainability reports.

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