국내외 ESG 평가사별 점수 비교: 국내 기업을 중심으로(Comparison of ESG Raters and Rating Scores: Focusing on Korean Firms)

최근 ESG(환경, 사회, 지배구조)에 대한 관심이 높아지면서 ESG 평가 및 데이터에 관한 관심 역시 높아지고 있다. ESG 평가기관은 기업의 지속가능공시 등을 참고하여 ESG 데이터를 수집하고 자체 기준에 따라 ESG 점수 및 등급을 발표한다. 그러나 평가기관별로 다른 평가 기준을 사용하며 평가에 포함되는 항목이 매우 다양하기 때문에 ESG 점수 및 등급의 상관관계는 낮은 편으로 알려져 있다. 이에 본 연구는 국내외 주요 ESG 평가기관의 특성에 대해 분석하고 ESG 점수 상관관계 및 점수 차이의 원인을 국내기업에 한정하여 분석하였다. In response to increasing demand for sustainable management, adopting Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) measures is now more important than ever. Firms now must disclose ESG performance to receive investment and meet the regulation making ESG disclosure mandatory in many countries and exchanges. With growing intertest in ESG and relating topics, evaluating firms’ ESG performance become necessary. Many regional and global ESG raters exist, focusing on different sets of firms. Regional ESG raters such as Sustinvest and Korea Institute of Corporate Governance and Sustainability (KCGS) in Korea are more knowledgeable in domestic situations and Korea-specific characteristics, and in particular, they can evaluate companies without English ESG and business reports. However, regional raters mostly focus on domestic firms, making it difficult to compare to internatioanl companies. Global raters have an advantage in this regard, however, their coverages in Korea are restricted to very large global companies. Major global raters include Sustainalytics, Moody’s, MSCI, S&P Global, CDP, Refinitiv, Bloomberg, and FTSE. Unlike credit ratings, ESG evaluation is heterogenous across raters as a company’s ESG performance is assessed using non-financial indicators with strong qualitative characteristics. Divergence in ESG evaluation is inevitable due to difference in eveluation objective, standards, categories, measurement, etc. However, if ESG ratings diverge too much, it misleads the investors and researchers by sending confusing signals on ESG performance. This research focuses on the divergence of ESG rating of Korean firms, and by following previous research that decompse ESG rating divergence in scope, measurement, and weighting. Chapter 2 analyzes the major raters’ methodologies, standards, objectives of ESG ratings. We focus on Sustinvest and KCGS for regional raters, and Refinitiv, Moody’s, Sustainalytics, and CDP for global raters. Each rater focuses on heterogeneous factors to produce the final scores and ratings. Except for CDP, the objective of global raters’ ESG rating is to provide information to investors, as a part of their financial service.(the rest omitted)