Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting in Emerging Economies: A Case Study of the Petroleum Refining Industry
Abstract
A majority of the literature on corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting focuses
on efforts made by companies headquartered in North America and Europe. Nevertheless,
many profitable companies from countries with emerging economies are beginning to
report on their social and environmental performance. However, the quality of these
CSR reports is relatively unknown. Therefore, the purpose of this project is to benchmark
six different company’s sustainability reports in order to determine the quality of
reporting that exists for companies based in emerging economies. Based on the project’s
findings, it will be determined whether or not the initial hypotheses concerning the
quality of these companies’ sustainability reports were correct.
In order to truly determine the quality of CSR reports of companies from countries
with emerging economies, it would be necessary to look at a variety of different sectors.
Nevertheless, because of the narrow scope of this project, the analysis will only
focus on the petroleum-refining sector. By using the standardized benchmarking system
developed by SustainAbility Ltd. and UNEP, a compare and contrast analysis will be
conducted of each of the six chosen petroleum-refining companies’ CSR reports. Ultimately,
this project seeks to determine the range of CSR reporting quality scores that will
be given to these emerging economy ‘reporting leaders.’
This project set out to determine whether or not the CSR reports of publicly traded
petroleum-refining companies headquartered in emerging economies would rank higher
than the reports of state-owned petroleum refining companies that are also located
in emerging economies. This analysis generally supports this hypothesis. In addition,
this project also sought to determine whether the data support two other minor hypotheses:
(a) that publicly traded companies would include more information on stakeholder engagement
processes in their reports than SOEs, and (b) that publicly traded companies would
spend an equal amount of effort in describing their social and environmental performance
whereas SOEs would focus more on social performance. Results from the case studies
support the first minor hypothesis but not the second.
Type
Master's projectSubject
Corporate Social ResponsibilityEmerging Economies
State-Owned Enterprises
Publicly Traded Companies
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/394Citation
Barr, Maura (2007). Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting in Emerging Economies: A Case Study of the
Petroleum Refining Industry. Master's project, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/394.Collections
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