Analyse und Bewertung der Fortschritte Finnlands und Österreichs bei der Vorantreibung Nachhaltiger Entwicklung unter bes. Berücksichtigung der Funktion der Unternehmen

The main finding of this thesis is that enterprises hold a key position in a countries’ success in promoting sustainable development. As the aggregated “sustainable development index” has shown Finland is due to the responsible behaviour of the Finnish companies in this context a global leader. A more detailed examination, which was conducted by using a large number of various indicators, also led to the conclusion that Finnish enterprises make a bigger contribution to the promotion of sustainable development than enterprises in other countries, e.g. in Austria. Even tough the comparative study showed that Finland has certain problem areas as well, most of the analysed indicators clearly put Finland ahead of Austria and other countries. The question if Finland can be regarded as an overall leader in the context of sustainable development could not be answered explicitly however. This is due to the fact that objective criteria for weighting the assessed problem areas in Finland are not available. What can be said undoubtedly is that the present development in Finland is more likely to meet the requirements for sustainable development, which have been drawn up in this work, than other countries. As this thesis has shown Austria is partly amongst these other countries. This is due to the fact that there are certain aspects in Austria which show serious deficits.