Decoding CSR reporting on poverty alleviation in China: a symbolic power perspective

PurposeThe paper aims to examine the similarities of fast‐growth private enterprises (PEs) in China with particular focus on enterprises listed on growth enterprises market in order to draw managerial implications for other PEs.Design/methodology/approachThe paper looks at the release effects of intangible assets in PEs. It examines the excavation effects of preferential policy on PEs and goes on to discuss the agglomeration effects of the inherent advantages of these.FindingsThe paper argues that the fast growth of PEs in our sample was attributable to three main factors, i.e. benefits of intangible assets marketisation, shrewd use of government preferential policies and technological and managerial capabilities.Practical implicationsThis research calls for the Chinese Government to adjust relevant policies to create a fair and competitive environment for enterprises with different ownerships and different scales.Originality/valueThe paper highlights the fact that the social and economic conditions of China in the post‐transition period have changed greatly and that the Chinese Government needs to clarify and define the existing characteristics and functions of enterprises and improve their service‐oriented functions.

The re-emergence of private enterprises is one of the most important factors in China's recent economic development. They will play a key role in maintaining China's high growth rate and honouring its commitments to the WTO. Despite this they face obstacles to growth, including borrowing restrictions, high taxes, ineffective legal protection and lack of technical and information support. The authors in this book discuss these obstacles and propose measures for improving private enterprise development. They consider how private enterprises can help China mitigate its macroeconomic problems, such as unemployment, income inequality, financial disintermediation and cyclical boom and bust. Finally they examine the lessons to be learnt from other countries in promoting privatization.

Contents: Introduction, Shuanglin Lin and Shunfeng Song Part I Private Enterprises and Economic Development: Higher efficiencies or resource reallocation?, Li Gan, Shunfeng Song and Chiu Tan Size of the state-owned sector and regional growth in China, Kerk L. Phillips and Shen Kunrong Resource allocation and economic growth in China, Shuanglin Lin. Part II Government and Private Enterprises: Government and private enterprises: Wenzhou experiences, Wenbo Wu Property rights developments and productivity gains in China: a law and economics perspective, Xiaowen Tian and Vai Io Lo Evolution of economic development: entrepreneurs, market, and the state, Jack W. Hou Private enterprise development and governmental functions, Jian He. Part III Financial Reforms, Openness, and Private Enterprise Development: Causes of the non-performing loan piling-up in the late 1990s: a research note, Ding Lu, Sandre M. Thangavelu and Qing Hu Public venture capital: understanding the US and Chinese experiences, Changwen Zhao, Shuming Bao and Chunfa Chen The challenges China's private enterprises face in the WTO, Shaomin Huang, Dongxia Wu and Grant D. Forsyth. Part IV Ownership Reforms and Privatization: The privatization of Russian state industry: some lessons for China, Marshall I. Goldman Politician control, agency problems and ownership reform: evidence from China, Lixin Colin Xu, Tian Zhu and Yi-min Lin Hospital ownership: what can China learn from the US experience?, Wei Yu. Part V Corporate Governance and Efficiency: Corporate governance and the development of private enterprise in China, Aimin Chen and Ping Li The productivity efficiency of the state-owned enterprises in China, Chun-Chien Kuo The prospect of private economy in China, Xiaowen Tian Index.

PurposeThis paper aims to investigate the motivations behind the publication of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports, and particularly the effect of information asymmetry between firms and their owners.Design/methodology/approachA natural experiment contrasting the CSR reporting of private vs public firms is used to test whether the degree of information asymmetry is a significant factor in the decision to publish CSR reports. Using a hand-collected sample of the 239 largest US private companies matched with publicly-traded firms, the effect of these inherently different information environments on CSR reporting is tested through logistic regression. Factors suggested by stakeholder and legitimacy theories are tested for their differential impact on private vs public firms’ decisions to publish a CSR report.FindingsResults indicate that private firms are less likely to publish a CSR report than similar public firms. Public firms also follow Global Reporting Initiative guidelines more frequently, consistent with signaling report quality to dispersed investors. A subsample of private companies facing greater information asymmetry is found to be similar to public firms in their reporting behavior, reinforcing the link between information asymmetry and CSR disclosure. Further analysis suggests that non-owner stakeholders play an important role in private companies’ CSR reporting decisions.Practical implicationsIn addition to accounting and governance scholars, the findings should interest private firm managers preparing for an initial public offering (IPO), as the evidence suggests that CSR reporting is used to communicate information to dispersed investors. The insight into reporting motivations should be useful to accountants engaged in CSR consultation and assurance.Social implicationsWith the growing attention paid to the CSR performance of firms, demonstrated by the growth in socially responsible investing, the study provides evidence that effective communication of CSR information to investors may play a key role in CSR-engaged firms’ disclosure strategies.Originality/valueTo the best of the author’s knowledge, this study is the first to analyze the CSR reporting decisions of a large sample of publicly-traded and privately-held firms. The results add to our understanding of what motivates firms to publish CSR reports, highlighting the importance of information asymmetry between the firm and its owners.

The discourse of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) report can predict the performance of CSR. Research on the CSR report of international well-known companies can provide reference and encouragement for others listed companies. Based on the multi-dimensional analysis method of Biber, this study investigates the linguistic features of the CSR report discourse of Huawei and Apple. This study makes a comparative analysis of the CSR discourse from the two firms, to explore the differences in discourse functional dimensions between Chinese and American corporate CSR reports. This study finds that, on the one hand, there are differences between Chinese and American CSR reports in dimensions of Involved versus Informational Production, Explicit versus Situation-dependent Reference, and Abstract versus Non-abstract Information. Compared with Apple’s CSR reports, Huawei’s CSR reports are more informative and explicit, but less interactive and abstract. On the other hand, there is no significant difference between Huawei’s and Apple’s CSR reports in Narrative versus Non-narrative Concerns and Overt Expression of Persuasion dimensions, indicating that CSR reports are less narrative and persuasive in both Chinese and American firms. This study has implications for improving the quality of Chinese enterprises’ CSR reports and enlightenment value for corporations to improve social responsibility performance.

Large corporations and industry groups have always used mass communication media to inform and educate important stakeholders and the general public on issues where corporate reputation and public trust are intertwined, and where any deterioration in the linkage can have significant negative consequences. An emerging trend in this direction has been the explosive growth in the voluntary publication of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports. These reports, however, are vulnerable to corporate embellishments, which may erode their value as reputation-building instruments. To examine this situation, this paper provides a detailed and systematic analysis of 48 of the world’s largest corporations in the extractive industry (i.e., mining and minerals, oil and gas, and support services) that have published CSR reports in 2012. The extractive industry’s operations invariably raise important environmental, sociopolitical, and governance issues that are subject to heightened levels of public and regulatory scrutiny. Hence, their CSR reports carry a heavy burden of providing high-quality information that would engender public trust. Our examination of CSR reports of corporations is conducted through an analytical structure called the CSR-Sustainability Monitor® – the first system of its kind in the world that enables overall evaluations and comparisons of each CSR report with any other CSR report or group of CSR reports in our database. Our analysis shows that these companies’ CSR reports generally provide extensive information on major environmental, social, and governance issues. But they are less forthcoming on many controversial aspects of their operations that impact the public domain. This is unfortunate because it reduces public trust in the quality of these reports and undermines the value of one of the most important instruments of public communication available to the companies. Finally, we provide some suggestions that companies may incorporate into their CSR reports going forward.

List of figures List of tables List of contributors Preface Abbreviations Part I: Private Enterprise Development: Overview 1. Private Enterprise in China: Development, Constraints and Policy Implications - Ross Garnaut and Ligang Song 2. The Contribution of the Non-State Sector to China's Economic Growth - Xiaolu Wang Part II: Paths Towards Emerging Private Enterprise 3. Emerging Private Enterprise in China: Transitional Paths and Implications - Ligang Song 4. Private Enterprise Development in rural China - Yiping Huang, Fang Cai and Tina Chen 5. Privatisation and Economic Performance in China - Xiaowen Tian 6. SOE Reform and Private Sector Development in China - Yongzheng Yang 7. Privatising the small SOEs Yang Yao 8. The Impact of Foreign Direct Investment on China's Economy - Chunlai Chen and Christopher Findlay Part III: Market Reform and the Business Environment 9. Financing the Private Sector On Kit Tam 10. Financing Small and Micro-Enterprises in Rural Areas - Enjiang Cheng 11. Private Sector Development and the Labour Market Reform - Xin Meng 12. Private Enterprises and the Law - Jian Fu 13. Contract Disputes and Court Verdicts involving Chinese Private Enterprises - Rongshu Ke and Weiying Zhang Part IV: Governance and Innovation 14. Governance and Management - John Child and Hubertus Pleister 15. State-business Interaction in the IT Sector - Bennis Wai-Yip So Conclusion 16. Correcting Constraints to Private Enterprise Development: Lessons from a Private Sector Survey - Ross Garnaut and Ligang Song Index

Objective: We compared Chinese and American pharmaceutical companies' corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports to determine their differences and to analyze the possible reasons for them. Methods: We took as a model the top 500 pharmaceutical companies from Torreya's (a global investment bank) list of the 1,000 most valuable pharmaceutical companies in the world. We then collected the 2020 corporate social responsibility reports of 97 Chinese and 94 American pharmaceutical companies. These reports were analyzed using software such as ROST Content Mining 6.0 and Gephi 0.92. Results: We formed a high-frequency word list, a semantic network diagram, and a high-frequency word centrality scale for the Chinese and American pharmaceutical corporate social responsibility reports. The Chinese pharmaceutical companies' corporate social responsibility reports formed a layout of "double centers and double themes," and the text paid more attention to the disclosure of environmental protection information. The American pharmaceutical companies formed a report presentation form of "three centers and two themes," focusing on corporate social responsibility information disclosures from the perspective of humanistic care. Discussion: The differences in between Chinese and American pharmaceutical companies' corporate social responsibility reports may be due to different corporate development strategies, regulatory requirements, social demands, and the concept of "corporate citizenship." This study makes recommendations for Chinese pharmaceutical companies to better fulfill their CSR at three levels: policy-making, company management, and society.

PurposeThis study aims to investigate the relationship between companies filing versus those not filing corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports and corporate governance.Design/methodology/approachThe websites of US publicly traded companies were examined for commitment to CSR or sustainability reporting based on the preparation of voluntary reports. This information provided the CSR measure, the key independent variable in this study. The data used to compute discretionary accruals (based on the modified Jones model) were obtained from Compustat. Data on auditor tenure were retrieved from Audit Analytics. The number of members and financial experts on an audit committee were gathered from proxy reports filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.FindingsCompanies filing CSR reports have higher audit quality, higher audit committee quality, increased auditor tenure and lower auditor dismissal compared to those not filing CSR reports. The findings support stakeholder theory.Research limitations/implicationsThis study’s utilization of multiple measures of corporate governance provides insight into the robustness of the relationship between CSR reporting and corporate governance. Further, this research uses a different measure of CSR reporting; that is, companies that voluntarily prepared separate CSR reports following or not following the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines compared to reports prepared following the GRI guidelines. This approach increases the size and diversity (i.e. industries) of the sample (Kolk, 2003; Waddock and Graves, 1997).Practical implicationsThe findings suggest that companies engage in CSR reporting to indicate strong corporate governance.Originality/valueThis study uses multiple measures of corporate governance to demonstrate the positive relationship between CSR behavior (measured via filing of CSR reports) and corporate governance.

ABSTRACTThe Chinese economic transition from a centrally planned economy to a free market economy since 1978 has witnessed local private enterprises as underdogs. Compared with state-owned enterprises that benefit from soft budget constraints, private enterprises in China suffer from two institutionally induced pressures: legitimacy-lacking and resource-constraining pressures. Extending the insights from organizational imprinting theory, this article argues that the pressures from the past motivate Chinese private enterprises to seek legitimacy and knowledge through inward internationalization, and that inward internationalization would help private enterprises to achieve better performance. On the basis of 2,565 private enterprises in China, we find that the adverse founding environment prompt private firms to undertake a high degree of inward internationalization, which further enhances their subsequent performance. We also find that this performance-enhancing effect becomes stronger in regions with more developed intermediate institutions and high foreign direct investment density.

CCTV Financial 50 Index1, the first stock index released by China’s state media, was launched on June 6, 2012. As one of the elements looked at by the index to selected 50 best performance listed companies, social responsibility becomes a hot spot of social attention. This paper investigates the market effect of listed companies in A-share market which disclosed social responsibility report in 2010. Results of the study show that the information in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Report has no significant market effect as the disclosure of CSR Report. However, when the White Book of Chinese CSR Report is released, the information in CSR Report generates significant market effect. Moreover, the higher the quality of CSR Report disclosed, the more significant the market effect. In conclusion, the White Book of Chinese CSR Report has a reinforcing action on the information in CSR Report.

We provide the first direct analysis of the magnitude of unreliable quantitative information disclosed in corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports. CSR report reliability is of particular interest to fund managers for investment decisions as well as to policymakers for regulating and monitoring purposes. However, surprisingly little is known about CSR reporting reliability despite concerns raised in the prior literature (e.g., Laufer 2003; O’Dwyer 2002), We examine how often CSR reports for the Global Fortune 250 (G250) are restated, the magnitude of restatements, and factors associated with restatements during the period 2006 to 2013. During this sample period, the occurrence of restatements increased monotonically, with 39% of G250 CSR reports including one or more line-item restatements. The magnitude of the line-item restatements is quite high, with a median restatement of about 10%. We also find evidence of bias in the revised items toward overstatement. We find that restatements occur more frequently in firms that have reported a high level of social performance and that have environmental targets. The occurrence of restatement is also positively associated with firms residing in strong law countries and having their CSR reports audited. Our analysis of reporting bias indicates a negative association between use of Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) reporting guidelines and the likelihood of an overstatement. We also find a positive association between having the CSR report audited and the likelihood of revisions associated with overstatements. Together, our exploratory results indicate that CSR information may be unreliable and firms that face pressure to perform well have more restatements. However, our evidence is consistent with the restatements resulting from improvements in information systems over time rather than intentional bias. Our findings will help investors and fund managers better judge the reliability of CSR disclosures, and inform regulators and standard setters on ways to enhance the reliability of CSR reporting. Finally, we contribute to the audit literature examining sustainability assurance.

Standalone corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports vary considerably in the content of information released due to their voluntary nature. In this study, we develop a disclosure score based on the tone, readability, length, and the numerical and horizon content of CSR report narratives, and examine the relationship between the CSR disclosure scores and analyst forecasts. We find that CSR reporters with high disclosure scores are associated with more accurate forecasts, whereas low score CSR reporters are not associated with more accurate forecasts than firms who do not issue CSR reports. The findings are robust to controlling for firm characteristics including CSR activity ratings and financial narratives. The findings are driven by experienced CSR reporters rather than first-time CSR reporters. Together, our findings suggest that the content of CSR reports helps to improve analyst forecast accuracy, and this relationship is more pronounced for CSR reports with more substantial content.

Private enterprises have been playing an increasingly important role in the development of Chinese economy, but they are having difficulties in accessing external sources of financing which mainly include bank loans, stock market and informal finance. This paper has analyzed the reasons why they face such constrains and also given suggestions to Chinese private enterprises so as to improve their access to external sources of financing. It is believed that it can be helpful to domestic private enterprises in China. Keywords-financing; private enterprise; bank loan; stock

In the context of global technological revolution and rapid development of global economic integration, the private enterprises in our country face more challenges. In the new era, China's economy has shifted from high-speed growth to high-quality development; this puts forward higher requirements for the development of private enterprises in China. Facing new challenges and requirements, it is an important way to improve the international competitiveness of China's private enterprises to do a good job in the internationalization strategy. Therefore, this paper analyzes the current situation and development motivation of the internationalization of private enterprises in China, and finds the problems in the development of the emerging stage. Taking the internationalization of Huawei Group as a case, this paper analyzes the survival of the fittest in the development of Huawei Group's internationalization, and deeply analyzes the successful experience and lessons of Huawei Group's internationalization strategy. Combined with the national conditions of our country, this paper puts forward the enlightenment for the internationalization development of private enterprises in our country.