Abstract

Nowadays, the awakening of consciences pushes many people to redefine “profit”: One can benefit economically to shareholders while being harmful to the environment, to the citizens or to the populations living in the locality where a company is established. The purpose of this paper is to give the opportunity to question the pre-established standards of responsible rating because we will show you that it is a major issue. We have established indicators that highlight the different conventional rating procedures to challenge them. First, we want greater transparency in the calculation of these responsible ratings because we do not want to make the same mistakes as in 2008 (“Mortgage crisis”) with hidden ratings. We therefore need transparency, simplification, and objectivity, which will be highlighted in this paper thanks to a rating formula based on a crucial element that is often relegated to the background, yet which sums up the awakening of consciences and may seem antagonistic to liberal capitalism. This awakening of consciousness can be summarized, as we will demonstrate, by the term: << LOCAL >>. We intend to give a definition of this term and to establish a rating associated with this notion of LOCALITY. This paper mitigates the standard idea according to which sustainable rating methods is trustable and promotes Environmental Social-Governance (ESG) politics. In the first part, we will present the problem of responsible rating, then demonstrate the limits of current rating systems, then deduce what we expect from a responsible rating agency followed by concrete cases of this new rating system and finally we will propose a comparative study of rating systems according to our indicators.

Keywords: ESG, Impact, Local, Sustainable finance