Research On Corporate Social Disclosure In China

Nowadays, CSR is fundmental for a company's operation. Shareholders, public, medias, communities, government and NGOs all promote companies to disclose their social and environmental information. Under this situation, Chinese companies'fasten their social disclosure, in 2006, there were only less than 30 CSR reports, in 2009, more than 550 companies have disclosed their CSR reports. How about the quality of Chinese companies'social disclosure? What're the key determinants of corporate social disclosure? What's the value of corporate social disclosure?The this paper develops a"four in one"model which consists of responsibility management, economic, social and environmental responsibility. By analyzing the major international CSR indexes, national CSR initiatives, the author build the index systems of CSR evaluation for different industries, and then evaluate the level of responsibility management and CSR information disclosure of top 100 companies in China, according to the information from CSR reports, annual reports and official sites. The author researches the determints of CSR information disclosure of top 100 companies, and the value of CSR information disclosure.This paper is organized as follows: In the introduction, the author introduces the research background, the fundamental conceptions, the research topic and main contents of this dissertation. At the same time, I review the previous literatures and summarize disadvantages of China's researches, such as contents of corporate social disclosure, evaluation method, research subjectives and information resources and so on.Chapter 1 to chapter 4 is the main parts of the paper. Chapter 1 focuses on the theory and framework of corporate social disclosure.Based on thriple bottom line and stakeholders theory, the author has built a new theoretical model of CSR (see Figure 1). While all enterprises need to pursue responsibility management and implement economic, social and environmental responsibility, the content and importance of responsibility varies considerably from one industry to another. For this reason, this present study built an industry-specific CSR indicator system based on specific Charpter 2 is the evaluation of corporate social disclosure of Chinese top 100 companies. Through benchmarking analysis of international CSR indices, domestic CSR initiatives and CSR reports of global top 500 firms, an industry-specific CSR evaluating indicator system is built to measure the CSR management system performance and CSR information disclosure level of China top 100 firms using CSR reports, corporate annual reports and official websites as source information. The results of the evaluation reveal that (1) about two thirds of top 100 companies have poor performance of responsibility management and low level of information disclosure; (2) CSR management performance is far behind the CSR practice; (3) CSR indices vary remarkably from one type of enterprise to another in that CSR indices of national enterprises and state-owned financial companies are far ahead of those private enterprises, other SOEs and foreign-funded enterprises; (4) size of business is in direct proportion to CSR indices, i.e., the larger a company is, the higher the CSR indices are; (5) CSR index varies considerably from one industry to another, and the power and power grid industries are forerunners, while most of other industries are just beginners.Charpter 3 is the key determinants of Chinese corporate social disclosure. By using the 2008 data, the author research the influence of corporate size, industry, regulation department, profit, and reputation on corporate social disclosure. The result is that firm size, social glory and government regulation are key determinants for corporate social disclosure, and industry isn't the key factor.Charpter four is the value of corporate social disclosure. The result is that corporate social disclosure may promote the management level, improve corporate social reputation, but hasn't significiant influence on financial performance.Charpter five is the conclusion and advices. The author suggest that different stakeholders should promote corporate social disclosure, promote companies to publish CSR reports, regulate the contents of corporate social disclosure, and promote the audit of corporate social disclosure.Major contributions of this work are as follows: (1) develops a"four in one"model which consists of responsibility management, economic, social and environmental responsibility, which guides the corporate social disclosure better; (2)develops a set of corporate social disclosure indices, which integrate the international norms and domestic practices; (3)the evaluation on corporate social disclosure of China top 100 companies is the first in CSR research; (4)the research on determinants and value of corporate social disclosure are important for China's CSR research.