Catholic Social Thought and Sustainability. Ethical and Economic Alignment

• Main Authors: Ana María Gómez-Bezares, Fernando Gómez-Bezares
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-12-01
• Series: Journal of Risk and Financial Management
• Subjects: business sustainability; social doctrine of the Catholic Church; economic ethics; economic development; social economic progress; financial performance
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1911-8074/14/1/11
• ISSN: 1911-8066; 1911-8074

In this research, we demonstrate that business sustainability can be a model to foster in order to reach real development, as it is shown that business sustainability has both an ethical and economic logic. Even though, from an ethical point of view, sustainability can be well-founded on human rights and civic ethics, our goal in this paper has been to sustain and enrich business sustainability based on the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church, which can be shared in its advises by many non-Catholic people, as it is a rich source of wisdom. We have also studied its economic logic; analyzing why it is justified for sustainable companies to obtain good results, formulating the model to alleviate the agency problem (which allows it to overcome the traditional stakeholder model), studying empirical analyses that demonstrate the good financial performance of sustainable companies, and making a new analysis that confirms the above.