Extending “above-the table”-relationships has been a principal objective of corporate social
responsibility (CSR) from the very outset. This would provide benefits to the corporation and its
stakeholders by getting everyone closely involved in the raison d'être of the business, through
inviting them to pose their perspectives and to participate in decision-making. The same applies
to sustainable development. However, when it comes to measuring how these efforts can be
integrated into overall corporate performance, the major emphasis is on technical data. The
main achievements have been consolidated in the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) where each
of the indicators prudently measures a well-determined set of facts. But one major discussion
point is whether GRI and other reporting frameworks do really reflect the link between the
outcome of CSR and economic value, and how they would properly connect to the information
used by management for running the business on a day-to-day basis. This article tries to point
out that one way out of the disconnectedness might be through expanding the concept of
‘Economic Value Added’ (EVA). EVA measures overall corporate performance by claiming that
shareholders gain when the return from the capital employed in a corporation is greater than the
cost of that capital. From there it is a short way to proclaiming that all stakeholders gain when
the value created by a corporation is greater than the cost of the capital employed in the
corporation and the capital employed in whichever commonly available resources outside the
corporation are used by its business. The expansion of EVA that is envisaged would be to
enlarge the cost of capital by the costs that are caused by that part of ‘Public Goods’ that is
available to a corporation. There is one political and one theoretical obstacle in this: the
argument is quite radical and complying with it would require some leadership from ‘big
corporations’; and valuing public goods is a research field that has not yet reached the stadium
of generally accepted applicability, at least with regard to aggregative monetary value. However
there are new initiatives under way, e.g. the International Integrated Reporting Committee now
formed, among others, by the GRI, which will join forces to reach a breakthrough.