The Research On Corporate Social Responsibility Information Disclosure Of China’s Listed Bank

In the context of economic globalization, the development of Chinese market economy continues and deepens. Market Entity requires increasingly high quality and wide variety of market information, among which the information of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is one of the important items. The frequent exposure of food security incidents, such as Chinese Sanlu milk powder incident, horse beef scandal in Europe, etc, greatly arouse the public’s awareness of importance of CSR in terms of people’s health and safety. The public’s demand on disclosing CSR information becomes increasingly strong.In order to further improve people’s livelihood and continuously expand the scope of corporate social responsibility supervision, the government vigorously advocates enterprise’ bearing the social responsibility and disclosing relevant information, and has put forward a series of effective policies and regulations. The enterprises also clearly recognized that shouldering social responsibility and disclosing relevant information has a positive impact on their own development. Therefore, enterprises in all fields began to swim with the new developments, make efforts to carry out the CSR practices, and learn from international advanced experience to constantly enhance the level of CSR information disclosure.As an important component of China’s financial industry, commercial bank is an important carrier of the monetary policy transmission. In the process of financial resources allocation, it occupies a core position and affects the development of national economy and the stability of society. As special financial enterprises, social responsibilities of commercial banks are not limited to the enterprise itself. From the general perspective, bank undertakes the social responsibility of protecting the environment. guarantees the rights of employee and safeguards the interests of customers and so on. Regarding to the special nature of bank in the function of financing to other enterprises, they can make use of financial leverage to influence other enterprises in items of implementing environmental protection, product safety, resources reserving and social responsibility. Therefore, it is of vital importance for commercial banks to bear social responsibility and disclose information.The present thesis studies the Social Responsibility Report of the Chinese Banks listed in Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share, aims to horizontally and vertically analyze the status quo of the CSR information disclosure of commercial banks through statistical description, index analysis and case study, and, on this basis, summarizes the characteristics, identifies problems, and proposes suggestions. The present thesis is of crucial significance in commercial banks’ better understanding the disclosure of their own CSR information, banks’ improving the disclosure quality and level of social responsibility information, regulatory authorities’supervising commercial banks’ to fulfillment of their social responsibilities as well as in providing reference to the improvement and perfection of Bank’s CSR supervising mechanism, and comprehensively understand China’s listed banks.The thesis consists of seven chapters. The first three chapters are introduction, literature review and theoretical foundation, mainly focusing on classification and review of literatures about CSR information disclosure, combing the emergence and development of CSR information disclosure, elaborating related theories so as to provide a basis for later analysis. Chapter Four takes the published social responsibility reports of sixteen listed Chinese banks in the previous five years as research objective, vertically analyzed the developments of the CSR information disclosure of Chinese listed banks’from the perspectives of amount, composing methods, structure and reliability of the report. Chapter Five applies the index analysis, horizontally described the status quo of CSR report information disclosure of Chinese listed banks in2011. Chapter Six is a case study of Chinese Merchants Bank. The annual social responsibility report from2007and2011are selected to analyze the CSR information disclosure from the angles of report structure, report content, report reliability. Chapter Seven are conclusion and suggestions. On the basis of previous studies, the chapter analyzes the characteristics and shortcomings of the present CSR information disclosure of listed banks in China, and suggestions to improve the inadequacies are proposed. The author believes that CSR information disclosure of listed banks in China is relative new, but its development is rapid and significant, showing a continuous enrichment and refinement in the content of CSR information disclosure, enhancement in logic and reliability of the content, and variety in forms and other features. At the same time, there are many inadequacies, such as the incomparability of social responsibility information comparable CSR information disclosure asymmetry between disclosed social responsibility information, the wide gap between the level of detail between disclosed social responsibility information, inaccuracy of some quantitative indicators, strong promotional purposes and so on. The thesis proposes the following suggestions:reform the banks’disclosing system of responsibility information, increase the quantitative indicators of measuring social responsibility information, and enhance the Bank’s comparability of social responsibility information. It also recommends establishing norms of social responsibility reporting standards and reporting model, focus on the balance of CSR information disclosure, transform the consciousness of CSR information disclosure, and correctly understand the significance of CSR information disclosure.This thesis contributes in that it comprehensively analyzes the status quo of CSR information disclosure of listed banks in China in both horizontal and vertical dimensions and from overall as well as individual perspectives, and reflects the rules and characteristics of the present CSR information disclosure of the listed banks in China; It also benefits in that the content evaluation index system and reliability ratings program of banks’CSR information disclosure modified and established in studying the content and reliability of CSR information disclosure can be referred to for future research; the findings of the research can also provide reference to regulatory authorities to regulate CSR information disclosure of listed banks, give suggestions to listed banks to fulfill the responsibility of CSR information disclosure.The shortcoming of this thesis are as follows:although "index analysis" is considered to be a relatively reasonable and commonly used method in the study of CSR information disclosure, it is difficult to be completely free from subjective thoughts in conducting the ratings process, thus deviation is inevitably between the results of the research and the reality; the established evaluation system of Bank’s CSR information disclosure, applying selected important content indicators to measure banks’fulfillment of various stakeholders’social responsibility, is unable to embody all the social responsibly information of various stakeholders.