Methodical Approaches to Measuring Sustainable Development of Industrial Enterprises

Abstract

1. Introduction The concept of sustainable development is now one of most popular and supported by the world community concepts of interaction between society and nature. In the Agenda for XXI (Agenda for XXI Century, 1992) this concept was defined as a system of harmonious relations in the man--environment--economy triad. Based on the general principles of sustainable development, each component at the same time has its own peculiarities of functioning and interaction. The general form of evolution of the Russian industry sphere could be presented in the following way. At the first stage, there is formation of the Russian industry as such at the beginning of the 20th century--back then, its influence on the economic development of Russia was insignificant. The second stage includes quick development of the Russian industry in the middle of the 20th century and its transformation into a basis of economy and moving force of national economic development. The third stage includes transition of Russia to post-industrial model of economy development at the beginning of the 21st century--industry moves to far plane, but continues influencing the provision of economic growth and development. 2. Model of the growth rate of indicators for sustainable development assessment Currently, criteria and indicators for sustainable development are in active development. The developers include the leading international organizations: UN, World Bank, European Commission, World Wildlife Fund, and many others (Alferova and Tretyakova, 2013). Furthermore, this issue is being an object of many research works (Zinger, 2010; Karpova, 2010; Kolosov, 2011; Koryakov, 2012; Lyushin, 2006; Melnik, 2009; Mikitas, 2013), although they generally tend to reflect the state of economic, environmental and social spheres of life in a static state. However, sustainable development is essentially a dynamic process (Alferova and Tretyakova, 2013), therefore, we propose a system of dynamic indicators taking into account not only the balanced state of environmental, economic and social spheres, in a particular period of time, but also helping to reflect positive changes through the development process. In addition to abovementioned advantages relative indicators allow us to compare not only the incomparable values but enterprises of different sizes. To this end, we propose to use such indicator of dynamics as a rate of growth (see. Table 1). In our model, economic sustainable development is represented by six parameters including the rate of growth in profit before tax, revenue growth, asset growth, the pace of growth in the share of innovative products, the growth rate of investment into innovation and the growth rate of equipment wear. There are two indicators: the growth rate of average wages and productivity growth have been attributed to our socio-economic sphere, as being a purely economic indicators they can indirectly characterize this social aspect of human activity and the tension to facilitate the implementation of the principle of social justice when paid(Ferrero and Hisgen, 2014). We relate the growth rate of penalties for environmental pollution to economic and environmental field, since the use of economic measures is aimed at reducing the harmful effects of enterprises on the environment. This rate can be partly attributed to the social sphere, given that law compliance is an essential feature of the social responsibility of enterprises (Platania, 2014). Except that the environmental field is presented by growth rate of emissions and growth rate of investment in the environment. Despite the fact that investing into environment is an economic indicator, in our model they are included into the unit characterizing the economic and environmental spheres, since they also characterize environmental cost effectiveness on environmental protection measures (Ozkan and Ozkan, 2012). Social sphere is represented by the growth rate of training costs, the growth rate of investment into social sector, the growth rate of personnel turnover and the growth rate of injury and work-related diseases (Chen, 2013). …