Ownership Holds the Key: How Accounting Tools Drive ESG Success in Asia’s Food Giants

Can the humble tools of management accounting genuinely steer some of the world’s most scrutinized corporations toward better environmental, social, and governance outcomes? A new peer-reviewed study published in Discover Sustainability suggests the answer is a qualified but compelling yes, provided that the right corporate ownership structures are in place. Analyzing five years of panel data from 51 publicly traded food companies across Asia, researchers found that two long-standing accounting instruments, the Balanced Scorecard and Environmental Management Accounting, significantly boost ESG performance, while a third popular technique, benchmarking, appears to do little of the kind. The findings arrive at a moment when investors, regulators, and consumers are demanding harder evidence that sustainability commitments translate into measurable results rather than glossy report language.

The research team, led by Ibrahim O. A. Eriqat of Smart University College for Modern Education in Hebron, together with Lau Poh Ting and Faros Faizdnor of Asia Pacific University of Technology and Innovation in Kuala Lumpur and Zahra Mohamed El Shlmani of Universiti Sains Malaysia, examined the period from 2019 to 2023. This window captures a turbulent stretch for global supply chains, spanning the pandemic years and their aftermath, when food producers faced intense pressure over emissions, labor practices, and governance standards. By focusing on the food sector, the authors targeted an industry whose environmental footprint, from agricultural sourcing to packaging and distribution, makes it a bellwether for corporate sustainability across emerging and developed Asian markets alike.

Methodologically, the study relied on fixed effects regression, a statistical technique well suited to panel data because it controls for time-invariant characteristics of each firm, such as entrenched corporate culture or geographic location, that might otherwise confound the results. The dependent variable was the overall ESG score of each company, drawn from the LSEG database, formerly known as Refinitiv, one of the most widely used commercial sources of sustainability ratings. The independent variables were constructed with care. The extent of Balanced Scorecard adoption was measured through a content analysis index built from annual report disclosures, capturing how thoroughly firms described performance measurement practices tied to the scorecard framework. Benchmarking exposure was coded as a binary disclosure score, reflecting whether companies reported comparing their performance against peers.

Environmental Management Accounting, the third tool under scrutiny, was proxied by the LSEG Emission Score, a measure reflecting how firms manage environmental information and emissions-related performance. EMA as a discipline involves the identification, collection, and analysis of physical and monetary information about environmental impacts, from energy use and water consumption to waste streams and greenhouse gas outputs. Unlike conventional financial accounting, which treats environmental costs as externalities or lumped overhead, EMA attempts to make those flows visible to managers so they can be priced, reduced, and optimized. The study’s finding that EMA is significantly and positively associated with ESG performance reinforces a growing consensus that what gets measured in environmental terms genuinely gets managed.

The Balanced Scorecard result carries equal weight. Developed in the early 1990s by Robert Kaplan and David Norton, the scorecard was designed to break the tyranny of purely financial metrics by adding customer, internal process, and learning-and-growth perspectives to performance evaluation. Over the decades, many organizations have extended the framework to include sustainability dimensions, embedding environmental and social targets directly into the dashboards that executives review. The Asian food sector data suggest that this integration matters: firms that disclosed richer Balanced Scorecard practices showed significantly stronger ESG outcomes. In effect, when sustainability objectives sit alongside profit targets in the same management apparatus, they are less likely to be sacrificed when trade-offs arise.

Benchmarking, by contrast, emerged from the analysis with no notable impact on ESG performance. This null result is one of the more provocative aspects of the study. Benchmarking, the practice of comparing one’s processes and outcomes against industry leaders or standards, is often promoted as a low-cost route to improvement. Yet the authors’ findings indicate that, at least as disclosed in annual reports across this sample, benchmarking activities do not meaningfully align firms with ESG goals. One plausible interpretation is that benchmarking in practice tends to focus on operational and financial comparators rather than sustainability metrics, or that firms engage in it superficially, treating peer comparison as a reporting exercise rather than a driver of structural change.

Perhaps the most striking finding concerns profitability. The study detected a negative correlation between return on assets and ESG performance, implying potential short-term trade-offs when firms invest in sustainability. This result will resonate with executives who have long argued that environmental and social investments impose costs that depress near-term returns, even as sustainability advocates counter that such investments pay off over longer horizons through risk reduction, regulatory preparedness, and reputational capital. The data from Asian food producers lend empirical texture to this debate, suggesting that in the five-year window studied, the financial burden of sustainability initiatives was real and visible in the bottom line, at least for the more profitable firms in the sample.

The moderating role of corporate ownership adds a governance dimension that elevates the study beyond a simple tool-by-tool audit. The researchers measured corporate ownership as the percentage of outstanding shares held by other corporate entities, using LSEG data. Their analysis showed that ownership exerted a positive moderating influence on the relationship between the accounting tools and ESG outcomes. In plain terms, the same accounting instruments appeared to work better, producing stronger ESG gains, when a meaningful share of the company was held by other corporations. The authors interpret this as evidence that governance structure shapes the effectiveness of ESG-related management practices, with corporate owners potentially supplying monitoring, resources, and strategic discipline that amplify the impact of measurement systems.

This ownership effect has practical implications that ripple well beyond the food aisle. Institutional investors and parent companies often position themselves as stewards of sustainability, pressing portfolio firms to adopt reporting frameworks and performance targets. The study’s results suggest that such stewardship is not merely rhetorical: the presence of corporate owners appears to convert accounting tools from passive reporting devices into active levers of ESG improvement. For policymakers in Asian markets considering mandatory ESG disclosure regimes, the finding hints that rules targeting ownership transparency and governance quality may complement disclosure mandates, since the machinery of measurement seems to function best within certain governance configurations.

The study also controlled for firm size, leverage, and age, using the natural logarithm of total assets, the ratio of total debt to total assets, and years since establishment respectively, to isolate the effects of the accounting variables from structural differences among companies. The research received no external funding, and the authors declare no competing interests. Published open access under a Creative Commons license, the work invites replication in other sectors and regions, a necessary step before its conclusions can be generalized. Still, for a region whose food industry feeds billions and whose emissions footprint continues to grow, the message is clear and actionable: the Balanced Scorecard and Environmental Management Accounting are not bureaucratic relics but strategic instruments capable of embedding sustainability into corporate decision-making, and their power depends substantially on who owns the enterprise and how seriously that owner takes its governance role.

Subject of Research: The effect of management accounting tools and corporate ownership on ESG performance in Asian publicly traded food firms

Article Title: Corporate ownership and the effectiveness of management accounting tools in enhancing ESG performance

Article References: Eriqat, I. O. A., Ting, L. P., El Shlmani, Z. M., & Faizdnor, F. (2026). Corporate ownership and the effectiveness of management accounting tools in enhancing ESG performance. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04776-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04776-4

Keywords: ESG performance, management accounting, Balanced Scorecard, Environmental Management Accounting, benchmarking, corporate ownership, corporate governance, food industry, Asia, sustainability, fixed effects regression, Discover Sustainability