Competitive Cost Advantage: An Application of Environmental Accounting and Management Approach with reference to Bangladesh

In today’s world, advanced nations are enthusiastically performing environmental activities to capture the definitive attainment of financial advantage. Emerging and developing nations are also capturing them gradually. The adoption of environmental management systems and the application of environmental accounting practices are the key tools to meet the financial advantage through increasing the cost advantage. This paper examines the impact of the adoption of environmental management systems and the application of environmental accounting practices with an environmental cost advantage. We gather 268 responses from the respondents by the convenient sampling method and employ the Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) technique to find the effect. We use Smart PLS version 3.3. to conduct the analysis. We find robust evidence that the more the adoption of environment systems (e.g., Pollution-prevention, the innovation of technologies, early adoption of environmental issues), the higher the cost advantage. We also find the robustness with evidence that the higher practices of environmental accounting defense the cost and boosted the cost advantage. In the empirical analysis, we further check the robustness with an alternative estimation method (e.g., hierarchical regression analysis), which also implies the same findings. It infers that environmental management systems and environmental accounting, which enable to concurrently protect the environment and reduce costs. These findings have authoritative implications for the regulatory bodies of organizations, academicians, and policymakers.