Research On Corporate Social Responsibility Information Disclosure And Influencing Factors

With the market economy continuous development, the companies which play important role in the economic development should undertake more and more social responsibility, the view that the companies should fulfill the concept of social responsibility while pursue their own economic interests has become a consensus. However, because of the lack of social responsibility in China’s food industry, serious incidents continue to occur; especially the emerging food safety incidents continue to shake public confidence in the industry. Food companies have a close relationship with livelihood; their corporate social responsibility not only affects on public health, but also on business success or failure, therefore, the study of food corporate social responsibility has a certain practical significance. The paper bases on the perspective of information disclosure, analysis of food industry companies’social responsibility information disclosure in recent years, researches the factors affecting the level of information disclosure, With a view to improve the level of the food industry disclosure, ultimately to achieve the target that food companies fulfill more social responsibility.First, this paper reviews the domestic and international relevant literature in the views of the content and from of the disclosure, and then reviews the researches of the factors of corporate social responsibility disclosure. On those bases, this paper presents the direction of this research.Second, this paper reviews the theoretical foundation for explaining the behavior of corporate social responsibility information disclosure, and the author puts forward her view on the behavior of disclosure in theoretical perspective, and on those bases of existing research results and the information disclosure motivation theory analysis, the author advance hypothesis of this paper.Third, by comparing methods of measuring the quality of corporate social responsibility information disclosure, this paper selects index method to study the situation of corporate social responsibility information disclosure in China’s food industry. Then this paper analyzes the contents of food companies’ corporate social responsibility information disclosure, on this basis, the author proposes corporate social responsibility information disclosure system and evaluation criteria.Fourth, this paper assesses the situation of corporate social responsibility information of listed companies in food industry from2007to2009, by using the index system proposed in the paper. The study finds that level of corporate social responsibility disclosure has been improving, but the overall disclosure level is still low; the amount of information disclosure are differences among each project, the disclosure about the information of relationship with suppliers and distributors is less; disclosure form is relatively simple, and difficult to obtain information by users; compared with other industries, the food industry’s corporate social responsibility information disclosure development lags behind.Then, this paper researches the external driving force of corporate social responsibility information disclosure in there perspectives, including the information needs from stakeholders, government regulation, market mechanisms. The empirical results show that the greater of the pressure from shareholders’ the information needs of from, the higher the quality of the social responsibility information disclosed; the demand for the information from creditors do not significantly affect the level of CRS information disclosure, and the nature of the ultimate controller significantly affect the relationship between the level of disclosure and the demand for the information from creditors, comparing to non-stated-controlled listed companies, stated-controlled listed companies’ constraint from the debtors has weaker positive relationship with the level of CRS information disclosure; the information needs of consumers have a positive impact on the level of disclosure, but not significant; it has been found that government regulatory and market forces are important driving forces to promote the level of CSR disclosure, and comparing to the market mechanism, government regulation plays a more important role in improving the disclosure quality.At last, against to the problems existing in CSR information disclosure of food industry, this paper proposes the corresponding policy recommendations, with a view to provide a reference of improving the lever of CSR information disclosure in food industry.