Read Online

Download PDF (EN)

Abstract

Purpose – The question of environmental sustainability continues to attract rapidly growing attention as it has become a central debate topic among academics, policymakers and business practitioners across the globe. Besides, extant literature highlights that the choices made about industrial processes, products and services are likely to have substantial environmental repercussions.  However, the pursuit of profits by business organisations often undermines the inherent environmental impacts. Consequently, this study aims to empirically investigate the effects of business processes on environmental sustainability.

Design/methodology/approach – The focus of this study is on 132 developing countries over the period 2005-2019. The empirical evidence is based on both robust OLS estimators and the Driscoll and Kraay robust standard errors.

Findings – We find that business processes, proxied by Gross value added in the agriculture, industry and services sectors contribute to environmental degradation through increased greenhouse gas emissions. These results are consistent across various income groups and geographical regions. Contingent on these findings, it is necessary for developing countries to provide incentives to business operations concerned with green processes while enforcing regulatory sanctions on environment-unfriendly practices.

Originality/value – Despite the growing research interest on green business processes, very little has been done beyond the confines of developed countries. Consequently, it becomes necessary to probe into the link between various business processes and environmental sustenance of developing countries. Besides, to the best of our knowledge, this study is the first attempt to comprehensively examine the relationship between business processes in the context of a panel of developing countries. The study therefore complements the extant literature by assessing the nexus between business processes and environmental sustainability in developing countries.