The International Application Of Equator Principles And The Implications For China

With the rise of corporation social responsibility, the Equator Principles has become a comprehensive social responsibility principles of commercial banks. As of September 2010, there have been 68 financial institutions in the word which adopted the "Equator Principles". This number may seem small, but they are the world's large and extra large financial institutions and have a huge volume of business which accounts for 90% of the global project finance. Moreover the members contain both developed countries and developing countries, which have business institutions in more than 100 countries on five continents. In the international trend, China can not keep out of the business. China raised the "green credit" policy in 2007, which is the prototype of Equator Principles, but also has a great gap with the it. Because of the weakness of environmental policy and the bank's own system and lack of personnel, China also has a distance with the Equator Principles. Therefore, how to promote the Equator Principles in China, and make it be integrated with the world financial system has become a problem worthy of careful consideration and discussion.In this paper, we start from the basic concept of the Equator Principles, introduced its contents, characteristics and significance, and through the implementation of the Equator Principles of two well-known international banks, to sum up the same and the different points of them. We take include the Equator Principles to the index system of social responsibility innovatively. We select five international banks'data in 2009, according to stakeholders of the commercial bank, and use the cluster analysis to illustrate social responsibility should be divided into two categories-economic performance and social performance, indicating that the social responsibility of commercial banks mainly reflected in the economic responsibility and social responsibility aspects. By the means of introducing the first equator bank of China-Industrial Bank's successful experience, we provide some references to other banks in our country. Moreover, the paper analyses the difficulties of the implement of the Equator Principles in China, make some targeted suggestions on how to get close to the Equator Principles.In this paper, we use the research idea of "from theory to practice, from international to domestic" and the theory of stakeholder to build a new commercial bank's social responsibility index system. We also analyze the raw data by cluster analysis. We reach the basic purpose of this study, and the paper has certain means to promote the Equator Principles in our country and to enhance domestic banks'sense of social responsibility.