ИСТИНА

The research was devoted to the assessment of Russian largest corporations by market capitalization from the point of view of the environmental aspects of their activity. Worldwide community’s attention to impact of the business on environment has enhanced recently. There is a great demand for information confirming that business, first of all large companies, can become responsible leaders of global steady growth by balancing three components of sustainable development: economic, social and ecological. The agenda in the field of sustainable development differs depending on scales, nature of activity and the product, inquiries of key interested parties and situation in territories of presence. This research was focused on evaluation of the impact of the large business on environment by using a number of ecological indicators common for all extracting, production and financial companies, weighted by revenue that makes them even more comparable. The methodology of research was based on principal component analysis, which is widely used in multidimensional statistics. The whole set of principal components with weighting coefficients equal to the proportions of the corresponding explained variance we used as an aggregate measure of various ecological indicators. This approach let us to avoid any expert assessments in construction of a rating. Rating can be applicable for evaluation of Russian largest companies’ efforts in construction of environmentally-friendly business model.