The key role of sustainable finance and the Covid-19 impact on ESG factors

In the last years the topic of sustainable finance has become more and more actual and started to play a crucial role in all companies’ lives because of regulations, incentives and especially because of the huge changes the world is facing; among them we cannot avoid including the pandemic of Covid-19, that made the entire planet change to adapt to the situation. For this reason, we are going to study a dataset made up of 1140 companies from different countries of the European geographical area with all the ESG scores divided by the four criteria (ESG total, Environmental, Social, Governance) to see whether the crisis due to the pandemic has made a speed up on the increasing process in the ESG transition. By means of computations on R Studio, we will find correlations between different economic sectors, similarities and differences between countries, and we will go further in depth with the analysis of some important sectors, more relevant with respect to our purpose. Finally, we will build different models with a regression analysis in order to see if the different variables from the years of our time interval influence the values of the total ESG score, verifying that the transition through a green and sustainable economy has not only accelerated because of countries’ regulations, but also because of the changes due to the period of pandemic.