Environmental, social and corporate governance in the context of "Social issues"

A credit rating agency (CRA, also called a ratings service) is a company that assigns credit ratings, which rate a debtor's ability to pay back debt by making timely principal and interest payments and the likelihood of default. An agency may rate the creditworthiness of issuers of debt obligations, of debt instruments, and in some cases, of the servicers of the underlying debt, but not of individual consumers.

Other forms of a rating agency include environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) rating agencies and the Chinese Social Credit System.

Sustainability reporting refers to the disclosure, whether voluntary, solicited, or required, of non-financial performance information to outsiders of the organization. Sustainability reporting deals with qualitative and quantitative information concerning environmental, social, economic, and governance issues. These are the criteria often gathered under the acronym ESG (environmental, social and corporate governance).

The introduction of non-financial information in published reports is seen as a step forward in corporate communications and an effective way to increase corporate engagement and transparency.

MSCI Inc. (formerly Morgan Stanley Capital International) is an American finance company headquartered in New York City. MSCI is a global provider of equity, fixed income, real estate indices, multi-asset portfolio analysis tools, ESG and climate finance products. It operates the MSCI World, MSCI Emerging Markets, and MSCI All Country World (ACWI) indices, among others.

The company is headquartered at 7 World Trade Center in Manhattan. Its business primarily consists of licensing its indices to index funds, such as exchange-traded funds (ETFs), which pay a fee of around 0.02 to 0.04 percent of the invested volume for the use of the index. As of 2025, funds worth over 16.5 trillion US$ were based on MSCI indices.