Research On The Influence Of Regional Characteristics On Corporate Social Responsibility

China has been undergoing extensive and vigorous economic booms since the reform and opening up.Under the conditions of the socialist market economy,a large number of high-quality modern enterprises with competitiveness and comparative advantages have been cultivated and emerged in China.These enterprises have become the main participants in the country’s economic activities and the main cells of the modern economy,as well as the core pillars and important forces of China’s economic and social development.These dynamic and continuously growing market entities have exerted an important and far-reaching impact on promoting the sustained and healthy development of the national economy,the continuous and effective improvement of people’s lives,and the establishment and improvement of a socialist market economic system.With the deepening of reform and opening up and the development of the market economy,the state has a clearer understanding of the important role and far-reaching significance of corporate social responsibility.In 2006,the “Company Law” included“social responsibility” in regulations,marking the gradual legalization and standardization of corporate social responsibility practice in China;in 2013,corporate social responsibility was written into the Party’s documents for the first time,and then on the 19 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China,the importance of Chinese enterprises’ fulfillment of social responsibility was further strengthened.All those are signals that the state has paved a way for the exploration and practice of social responsibility of Chinese enterprises.In recent years,based on reality and the actual situation of economic development n China,the state has attached great importance to curbing the unhealthy momentum of malicious expansion of capital,and has repeatedly conveyed the signal of preventing the disorderly expansion of capital.At the same time,with the normalization of the prevention and control of the COVID-19 epidemic,policies such as carbon peak and carbon neutrality have endowed corporate social responsibility with more profound connotations and far-reaching impacts.At the new development stage while following the new development concept,Chinese enterprises are faced with the external challenges of changing demand structure and increasing factor costs.At the same time,with the rise of new economic geography,the spatial dimension characteristics of the participants of economic activities have attracted much attention,and the plenteous regional characteristics have formed regional differences in natural resources,cultural backgrounds and business atmospheres.Therefore,enterprises in different geographical environments are faced with different factors ranging from marketization environment,traditional religious and cultural characteristics to economic characteristics.The differences brought by these regional characteristics will have a profound impact on the strategic decision-making and production and operation activities of enterprises,reflecting the indispensable significance of regional characteristics in explaining economic phenomena.The richness and diversity of regional characteristics will also provide new cognitions and ways for enterprises to fulfill social responsibility in more dimensions.In order to seek greater development space,enterprises must break the confinement and exploit new market for development,realize the optimal configuration of the factor market within a larger physical space,and seek the optimal configuration of the product market within a larger market space.Consequently,companies tend to make development strategies bridging over boundaries of their own geographical regions and even countries.The expansion of the enterprise on the geographical boundary has formed the spatial characteristics of the geographical dispersion of the parent and subsidiary companies of the enterprise.This new geographically dispersed spatial feature brings many new demands and challenges to the management and operation of enterprises.With the expansion in new regions,the enterprise will inevitably form a contract combination with the economic and cultural characteristics of the region with many stakeholders,and effective governance is particularly important;the enterprise needs to not only strengthen the construction of communication channels for the stakeholders,but also to straighten out the complex relationships between stakeholders in different regional cultures and regional economic environments.Therefore,under the premise of national economic and social security development,high-quality enterprises must explore paths that are conducive to their own growth and development,take responsibility and fulfill the missions of the new era by conforming to the national development trend,combining the connotations of geographical location,regional culture,regional economy,etc..To sum up,studying the influence of regional characteristics on corporate social responsibility has very important theoretical and practical significance today when the country has put forward new ideas for social and economic development and has new requirements for corporate social responsibility.This paper explores the relationship between regional characteristics and corporate social responsibility from the research perspective of regional characteristics,and with the focus on corporate social responsibility behavior and optimization.On the basis of literature and related theoretical researches,this paper sorts out the evolution characteristics of the economic geography of Chinese enterprises and the development process of corporate social responsibility practice.This paper constructs a unified analytical framework,and deconstructs the regional characteristics into three research dimensions: regional location characteristics,regional cultural characteristics and regional economic characteristics according to the division of regional characteristics in modern geography,and divides corporate social responsibility into five dimensions including shareholder responsibility,There are five dimensions of employee responsibility,consumer and other stakeholder responsibility,public welfare responsibility and environmental responsibility.On this basis,by taking Chinese listed companies as the research object,and based on the data collected and organized manually,this paper adopts the geographical location,regional culture and economic data corresponding to the geographical coordinates of the parent and subsidiary companies of the listed company to construct the regional characteristics indicators of dispersed parent and subsidiary companies,and empirically tests the consequences and mechanisms of the impact of regional characteristics on corporate social responsibility.This paper explores the performance of corporate social responsibility in different dimensions in various regional characteristics,which helps to understand the new characteristics and new patterns of regional characteristics and corporate behavior,and provides a micro perspective for promoting the sustainable development of enterprises.The research of this paper also enriches the research content of region and corporate behavior,and provides a new research context for the research on corporate social responsibility in my country.The main research contents and relevant conclusions of this paper are as follows:First,there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between the geographical decentralization of parent and subsidiary companies and corporate social responsibility performance: a certain degree of geographical decentralization can help improve corporate shareholder responsibility performance and improve employee responsibility and other stakeholder rights.Responsibility,however,a high degree of geographical dispersion may inhibit the realization of corporate shareholder responsibility and reduce investment in the rights and interests of employees and other stakeholders.In addition,geographic decentralization has a significant positive relationship with environmental and public responsibility.Taking the property rights of enterprises into consideration,state-owned enterprises perform significantly better than private enterprises in fulfilling environmental responsibility and public welfare responsibility.Finally,a spatial econometric model is introduced for testing,and it is found that there are industry and regional spatial effects of corporate social responsibility.Specifically,corporate social responsibility in the same region and industry will imitate each other and increase or decrease on average.Second,there is a significant positive correlation between religious culture and corporate social responsibility performance,which indicates that the religious cultural atmosphere in the region where the company is located promotes corporate social responsibility performance,as shown in the following points.First of all,enterprises which have products of higher quality can better protect the rights and responsibilities of consumers as stakeholders.Second,enterprises which invest more in energy conservation and emission reduction can better fulfil their corporate social responsibility for environmental protection.Thirdly,enterprises which have the larger number and amount of charitable donations performs better in the dimension of public welfare responsibility.Finally,taking the nature of corporate property rights consideration,different from the impact of geographical dispersion on corporate social responsibility,religious culture plays a more significant role in promoting corporate social responsibility in private enterprises.Third,a centralized and orderly market-oriented environment with high density will promote enterprises to better fulfill their corporate social responsibilities.The corporate social responsibility performance of companies in relatively developed regions in terms of shareholders,employees and other stakeholders is significantly better than that of companies in less developed market-oriented environments.In terms of enterprises’ fulfillment of environmental and public welfare responsibilities,a low degree of marketization leads to a lack of market competition,and enterprises lack the sense of urgency to fulfill the responsibilities of environmental protection and public welfare promotion;while a high degree of marketization leads to intensified market competition among enterprises,and the reputation value,political interests and other factors will urge enterprises to invest more in environmental governance and increase public welfare donations,thereby showing higher relevant social responsibilities.In addition,the shareholder responsibility performance of private enterprises is significantly better than that of state-owned enterprises,mainly because private enterprises have stronger profit motives,so private enterprises pay more attention to the needs of primary stakeholders such as investors.