In the last few years investors have been focusing on the ethical, social and environmental choices made by the companies they invest in. This made it necessary to be able to rate the ethical quality of the business carried out by listed companies.

Ethical rating answers this need by screening companies in order to assess their level of social and environmental responsibility.

The objective, once a company’s profile has been produced, is to publish a rating that expresses not so much the company’s “ethicalness” (we don’t have objective, homogeneous and universally accepted criteria for judging an enterprise’s ethicalness tout court) as its performance in terms of certain other related criteria.

Rating operations are normally carried out by agencies in countries where ethics-oriented investment is more common and usually concern listed companies.

In Italy, rating agencies include E. Capital Partners, Axia and Avanzi SRI Research, while the main agencies in other European countries are Siri Group, KLD, Eiris and Ethibel. Their activities range from ethical rating to consulting, research, index production and rating and/or creation of investment portfolios.