THE IMPACT OF ENERGY EFFICIENCY ON CORPORATE PERFORMANCE: GLOBAL ACADEMIC REVIEW

Abstract

The paper aims to explore the current literature about the performance duality, energy efficiency (EE) and corporate financial performance. An increased pressure from international organizations and regulators to internalize environmental mechanisms and sustainability processes into the business strategies of the companies impose to quantify such initiatives on corporate financial performance. Using a unique technic for text-analysis of articles published in the last 15 years we identified four clusters of keywords (Energy Efficiency, Economic Analysis, Performance assessment, Optimization and waste heat) that indicate the way the current academic contribution is structured. It was found that yet, the relationships between energy efficiency and corporate financial performance are still not enough studied mainly because of the lack of data disclosed through ESG reporting. Moreover, the energy efficiency research topics are dominated by engineering academic undertakings, which started to be approached by researchers in the earlies 2000. This aspect indicates that topic of energy efficiency at the beginning was considered the in context of corporate sustainable development through innovation. Our results demonstrates that most of the authors found a positive relationship between energy efficiency (measured through energy intensity) and corporate financial performance, but still there were also contradictory opinions.