1st ICAI 2020

International Conference on Automotive Industry 2020

Mladá Boleslav, Czech Republic

Sustainability Development Goals Followed by World and European Automotive Industry Radim Lenort 1 , František Zapletal 2 ŠKODA AUTO University 1,2 Department of Production, Logistics and Quality Management Na Karmeli 1457, Mladá Boleslav, 293 01 Czech Republic e-mail: radim.lenort@savs.cz 1 , ext.frantisek.zapletal@savs.cz 2

Abstract In 2015, member States of the United Nations met in New York to adopt 17 new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs provide an opportunity for the automotive industry to create value for both their business and society. The subject of the paper is the analysis of the SDGs preferences in that industry. The aim of the paper is to identify those SDGs that the automotive industry declares to follow. The paper explores how these preferences differ across continents with special focus on comparing Europe and the world. The multi-criteria decision-making method PROMETHEE and the GAIA plane were used for that purpose. The results show that the pattern of behaviour regarding SDGs substantially differs in different parts of the world. Keywords: automotive industry, corporate sustainability, GAIA plane, PROMETHEE method, sustainable development goals JEL Classification: C38, L21, L62 1. Introduction Corporate sustainability has been more and more in focus during the last years. This concept becomes the key strategy for a large number of automotive companies. Currently, these companies are beginning to report their sustainability performance in accordance with The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development by the United Nations. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015 are one of the key elements of this plan. The subject of the paper is the analysis of the SDGs preferences in the automotive industry. The aim of the paper is to identify those SDGs that the automotive industry declares to follow. The paper studies how these preferences differ across continents with special focus on comparing Europe and the world. Such problem, where similarities in patterns of behaviour are analysed, is usually solved using some of clustering methods (see Li, 2006; Aggarwal, 2014). However, our problem is quite special because we want to make the evaluation at the level of continents (not companies), and thus we do not have enough observations (units) to use for regular clustering methods (we will assess only four continents). Therefore, we have decided to choose one of general multi-criteria decision-making methods – PROMETHEE method, which can help to assess similarities and differences in SDGs

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