“This is something that New Europe is working on and the improvement during the last 10 years has been quite good,” said Martin Pitura, managing director of GES Investment Services Poland and author of the report.

GES assessed 29 European indexes, tracking the largest companies in each of the markets. Also included were the RESPECT index, which tracks Polish companies with the best corporate social responsibility performance, and the mWIF 40 index of mid-sized Polish companies. GES ranked the 746 companies making up the components of these indexes, using its internal ESG rating system.

Although the companies in the largest indexes may boast a much bigger market capitalisation than the components of some of the smaller country indexes, Pitura explained: “I was looking at how the largest companies for each market compared to each other.”

The leaders on ESG performance were the OMX Stockholm 30, the French CAC 40, Dutch AEX 25 and UK’s FTSE 100.

However, indexes of blue chip firms from central and eastern Europe begin to appear in the middle of the performance range, rated “slightly less than average” by GES. See chart for the full results.

“Indexes from New Europe are close to catching up on ESG reporting with indexes coming from Austria, Greece and Ireland, and the Polish RESPECT index even slightly exceeds the Greek FTSE Athex 20 index,” said Pitura.

However, when assessed separately on environmental, social and governance issues, Pitura said, the gap is more pronounced. “The corporate governance pillar in some indexes in new Europe is quite competitive. The gap between the best performing index in Europe, FTSE 100, and the best performing indexes in new Europe, WIG 20 [tracking the 20 largest firms on the Warsaw Stock Exchange] and RESPECT, is not that large,” he said. “The difference in environmental and social performance between new Europe and the rest of Europe is however quite large.”

Jess McCabe