Textmining Analysis on Conceptualizing Embedded Topics in EU ESG Discussion

Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) issues are gaining attention in politics, academic literature and business, yet the sudden soaring interest has brought certain ramification. Some issues are overlooked and lagging behind due to skewed focus on the causality and relationship with particular area such as financial performance. Under the assumption that there are underlying concepts beyond the issue of ESG evaluation score, the aim of this research is to explore and conceptualise the embedded ESG topics and policy implications from EU legislative documents. Considering limited research have been attempted to analyse ESG topics in EU documents and textmining algorithm to the field of ESG discussion provides further research topics, this research contributes to both practical and academic implications. Using textmining methodology of wordcloud and LDA topic modeling analysis, this research analyses the 89 documents retrieved from EUR-Lex portal published during 2019-2021, containing ESG related keywords. The result shows that 10 main topics are discovered from the analysis, and EU ESG discourse can be categorised three pillars with one regulatory framework: 1) ESG and Trade and Social development, 2) ESG and Sustainable Investment and 3) ESG and Industry with 4) ESG regulations.