The increasing awareness about sustainable development has led to growing literature in this research area. Since the adoption of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), companies have started to focus on the environment, people, and planet with the belief that it will lead to better financial performance. Thus, the relationship between sustainability practices and financial performance of companies has attracted much attention among researchers. This study identified the trends and issues highlighted in previous studies concerning the relationship between these two variables. Content analysis was adopted in this study to examine the literature comprising a total of 56 articles indexed in Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus. About 96% of the publications reported a positive relationship between sustainability practices and the financial performance of companies. This research area should be explored in all countries, especially developing countries, to facilitate the understanding of sustainability practices and their impact on financial performance.

This paper examines whether product market competition is associated with Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) and whether corporate governance moderates the effect of product market competition on ESG. Analysis involving 22,897 firm-year observations from 37 countries shows that companies with higher product competition have lower ESG and those with higher corporate governance have higher ESG. The results also indicate the moderating effect of corporate governance, as the negative relationship between product market competition and ESG diminishes for companies with higher corporate governance. The results remain robust in additional analysis using alternative measures for product market competition and corporate governance. The findings support the joint effect of product market competition and corporate governance in determining corporate performance in ESG. The findings reflect the various pressures influencing ESG practices, and on how the strength of corporate governance plays a vital role in ensuring strategic ESG being employed for the sustainable performance of companies. The findings have implications on companies that want to factor ESG into their plans especially to reinvent their companies for the period that follows the COVID-19 pandemic.

The challenges posed by environmental degradation and abandoning of social rights to secure business interests have highlighted the importance of focusing on sustainable development within the global financial system, especially among citizens and policymakers. The timely declaration of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by the United Nations is appropriate in addressing environmental degradation. In fact, the SDGs have become part of the fundamental agenda and essential requirements of every business, including Islamic financial institutions. In particular, the concept of sustainable development is parallel with Islamic teachings, which promote welfare, security, and rights for the sake of the current and future generations. Furthermore, Islamic finance and the SDGs are closely associated, as the former is capable of serving a meaningful function in sustainable development to achieve the goals of implementing fair and equitable tools, promoting resource mobilization, and enabling social benefit tools. Therefore, this study highlights an important case for Islamic financial institutions by expounding on the best indicators for sustainable Islamic finance.

This study conducts an analysis of interaction effect between corporate governance and CAMEL framework (capital adequacy, asset quality, management competency, earning quality, liquidity) toward bank performance in Malaysia. The study highlights the corporate governance as a moderator to CAMEL framework in enhancing the bank performance. Additionally, to closely examine the interaction effect, the simple slope test is employed in this study to investigate the impact of high and low corporate governance toward CAMEL framework and bank performance. The result indicates that capital adequacy, management competency, earning quality and liquidity have a significant relationship with bank performance when interacting with corporate governance. However, the result of simple slope test shows that management competency and liquidity have a better interaction with high corporate governance. The outcome of the study should be to provide vision to the corporate governance bodies in Malaysia, depositors, investors, stakeholders and also researchers to adopt and increase knowledge especially on how corporate governance and CAMEL framework could improve bank performance.