Global Reporting Initiative

For the past 10 years many companies have started reporting on the impact of their company on the world. Many companies have also started producing separate annual Corporate Social Responsibilty or Sustainability reports. This type of report covers information about economic, environmental, social and governance performance.

A Non-Governmental Organization was formed in 1997 and is now called the Global Reporting Initiative. This organization has a specific website where issues relating to corporate sustainability are posted and guidelines are issued. These guidelines are now widely used as a reporting framework for performance on human rights, labor, environmental, anti-corruption, and other corporate citizenship issues. In 2006 the third generation of guidelines were issued: GRI3. Work is already underway on vesion 4 of the guidelines.

Author information: LinkedIn

09:21 PM - 20 December 2011

WorldScope company coverage update

WorldScope company records now cover annual reports data for 71413 companies. This includes 45872 active and 25541 inactive companies. This update: 498 companies were added. WorldScope company records are available through Datastream and LexisNexis.
I have updated the WorldScope country coverage file and it now includes the latest update as it was posted in the fourth Thomson Reuters Infostream quarterly publication of 2011. Several new countries are now added and a lot of new companies are now covered.

New Country (Number of company records):
Bangladesh (16)
Cambodia (1)
Guernsey (19)
Jersey (9)
Niger (1)
Senegal (1).

Major updated Countries:
Australia (41)
Canada (54)
China (85)
South Korea (29)
Taiwan (21)
United States (74)

Author information: LinkedIn

11:57 PM - 8 December 2011

World Bank Commodity Prices - update November 2011

New and updated information on commodities have been published in the December monthly pink sheet. The new pink sheet can be downloaded through the website on commodity markets. It is available as a PDF file.
The World Bank also offers an updated complete historical monthly commodity price series starting from 1960. The overview can be downloaded as an excel file and has the new monthly price data up until November 2011.

Author information: LinkedIn

10:41 PM - 7 December 2011

Using a specific list of companies in Zephyr

Zephyr is a database containing information on: Mergers & Acquisitions, Initial Public Offerings Venture Capital transactions. The database covers transactions & deals worldwide. The database offers many search options. An important search option for looking up a list of preselected companies is "Identification numbers". The company identification numbers that can be used are:
- BVD ID Number
- Ticker symbol
- ISIN Number.

The identification numbers that can usually be used in other databases as well are the Ticker symbols, and the ISIN numbers. After choosing the option "Identification numbers" you can use the button Load from disk (on the left side in your screen) to open a text or Excel file with a list of (one of) these codes. It is also possible to select whether the codes should match one or more of the company types: Acquirer and/or Target and/or Vendor.

NB: The BVD ID Number is a proprietary number of companies in online databases created by Bureau van Dijk.

Author information: LinkedIn

01:22 PM - 2 December 2011

World Bank Commodity Prices - update October 2011

New and updated information on commodities have been published in the November monthly pink sheet. The new pink sheet can be downloaded through the website on commodity markets. It is available as a PDF file (no longer as a separate monthly excel file).

The World Bank also offers an updated complete historical monthly commodity price series starting from 1960. The overview can be downloaded as an excel file and has the new monthly price data up until October 2011.

Author information: LinkedIn

01:08 PM - 4 November 2011