Csr En Asia

CSR in asia, a comparative analysis of India, china and Japan

Abstract

Investment in social and environmental issues are becoming dramatically important in our modern day world. This has led toan increased reliance on corporate social responsibility reporting. There is a growing debate about how the information about this should be reported. The purpose of this paper is to find out how thegovernments and the companies in India, China and Japan compare in addressing this issue. While neither of these countries appears to have any sort of mandatory regulation of CSR reporting, Japanseems to be more progressive on the issue.

Keywords: corporate social responsibility, India, China, Japan

Introduction

“The phenomenal economic growth of India and China has led to worseningenvironmental and social problems with social responsibility implications for businesses in those countries”

Wong et al., 2010, p. 299

The previous quote suggests the seriousness of thequestionable level of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in China and India. It is widely known that the economies of India and China are booming, but up to this point has there not been much research done onthe negative effects of this growth on their CSR. Consequently, this paper seeks to find out whether the previous quote is valid and how the level of CSR in India and China compares to that in analready well established Asian economy like Japan. Namely, Japan is Asia’s most developed and largest economy. In addition, Japan is doing economically well for a longer period of time so one may assumethat Japan is ahead with regards to their level of CSR compared to the other two rising economies China and India.

Furthermore, after an extensive literature review, it became clear that there hasbeen done a lot of research about the level of CSR already, such as comparisons between the US and the EU. Tschopp (2005) describes in his paper that neither the US nor the EU has any sort of...