Understanding Sustainable Entrepreneurship in the Fourth Sector Through Integrated Balances: The Case of Uruguay

The main purpose of this chapter is to analyse the Fourth Sector in the light of Integrated Balance (IB). From our standpoint, IB constitutes an antecedent of a future development of the fourth sector, a driving force that will define its evolution in the immediate future. IB allows a better understanding about how profits and real cost of production coexist and whether or not it is worth for traditional (pro-profit) companies to report IB. We explore how some key firms’ characteristics are associated with the productive structure of companies, which have not been sufficiently studied in the literature and help to understand which firms are more likely to report IB. Most of the companies examined in the current literature on IB tend to be large/multinational companies from wealthy economies in prosperous sectors of activity, which are ranked in international sustainable indexes (DowJones and similar). Our model incorporates also domestic ones of medium and small size in all sectors of activity, both public and private, with different levels of experience and seniority in Uruguay. Our results suggest that the public nature and the international character of a company are key not only to increase firms’ odds to report integrated balances but also the quality and quantity of these reports.