ИСТИНА

Companies all over the world declare the commitment to sustainable development, though the unified toolkit for evaluating their ef forts has not been developed yet. This is an obstacle for efficiency analysis of the new business models based on sustainable development concept. There is an acute need for a suitable composite measure of sustainability of business activities that will be insensitive to subjective preferences for particular attributes of a multidimensional pattern of sustainable development. The question is how to aggregate partial measures using appropriate weighting coefficients that will not rely on subjective judgments concerning their relative significance. A rather simple but comprehensive approach based on principal component analysis can be used to avoid expert assessments when aggregating various indicators that reflect different aspects of social, economic and env ironmental activities of companies in a composite index. Slightly modifying the traditional principal component analysis it is possible to get a universal “natural” aggregate measure of various types of social and economic activities of business entities. The same approach can be applied to assess the efforts of regional authorities in the area of sustainable development. Basing on the methodology of generalized modified principal component analysis one can measure the overall state, factors and potential o f sustainability of regional development and can serve to improve regional environmental, social and economic policies. This methodology can provide a sustainability rating of companies and regions that can be a utility for consistent analysis of economic growth, progress in social and environmental responsibility of business and territorial units.