Mental health within ESG frameworks: a narrative and descriptive cross-national analysis

Despite the growing use of environmental, social, and governance criteria for evaluating sustainability and institutional performance, mental health remains at the periphery of mainstream discourse on the topic. The existing literature often explores environmental efficiency, social inclusion, and good governance without necessarily incorporating mental health as a core component of the sustainability framework. This research study helps fill this existing research gap by integrating a narrative literature review with a cross-country descriptive analysis of the associations between the various dimensions of ESG factors and mental health outcomes across 31 countries from 2010 to 2022. Mental health outcomes are measured by population-level prevalence rates reported by the World Health Organization, while the various ESG factors are extracted from the World Bank's Sovereign ESG dataset. This research study will employ a thematic-descriptive research design to examine the associations among the multiple aspects of the ESG framework and mental health outcomes, without necessarily attempting to build a theory or construct a model of causation. This study will not attempt to apply the research results to create a specific behavioral or welfare-theoretic framework or model of mental health outcomes. Instead, this research study will aim to provide a broad overview of the associations between the various factors of the ESG framework and mental health outcomes across 31 countries. Among indicators of good governance, the rule of law consistently plays an essential role in shaping mental health outcomes across the analyzed countries.