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Corporate social responsibility

Weekly Wire: the Global Forum

Kalliope Kokolis's picture

These are some of the views and reports relevant to our readers that caught our attention this week.

The Guardian
Youth unemployment: can mobile technology improve employability?

“Attention in the development sector has shifted sharply towards two areas over the past couple of years: youth and employment. While the huge increase in some countries' 15-24 year old population offers an opportunity for catalysing change and bringing in fresh ideas and new energy, many are grappling with the challenge of providing young people with meaningful work opportunities and concerned about the growing number of youth who are disillusioned about their futures.

The ILO reported that 74.8 million youth between 15 and 24 years were unemployed in 2011, an increase of more than 4 million since 2007. Globally, the youth unemployment rate is almost 13%, and youth are nearly three times as likely as adults to be unemployed. In some countries there are no jobs. In others, there is a skills mismatch and with some quality soft and hard skills training and support, young people could be ready for existing, unfilled jobs.”  READ MORE

How Japanese shoppers helped bring elephants back to an Indian forest

Saori Imaizumi's picture

Organic cotton farmers, Golamunda village in Orissa, 2010What if your shopping sprees could make both you and society happy? That every time you bought your favorite clothes, you also benefitted the poor and the environment? Some Japanese companies are indeed making this happen.

As part of their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities, Felissimo, a Japanese direct marketing and product design company funded the planting of trees in Orissa and West Bengal in India, where they source their materials from. By charging an extra dollar on every sale in Japan, they collected more than $4,850,000 over 15 years and used the funds to transform a degraded landscape into a forest, bringing elephants back into the area.

In a similar manner, the company also helped cotton farmers in Orissa switch to growing organic cotton to save their land, their workers, and their children from harm caused by fertilizers and pesticides. Between 2010 and 2012, about 5,900 farmers switched to organic farming in 5 villages. Consumer donations were channelized through a local NGO to help farmers make the transition. The money was also used to give scholarships to local children. In 2012 alone, around 250 students in 5 villages received scholarships. While the scale is still small, Felissimo has successfully created a funding mechanism to transform responsible purchasing behavior in one part of the world into social impact in distant lands through its CSR activities.

Do the economics of Corporate Social Responsibility matter for Private Sector Interventions?

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has attracted significant discussion and controversy since the times of Milton Friedman’s famous 1970 NYT article stating that the only social responsibility of firms is to maximize profits. However, the conclusion that CSR automatically is in conflict with profit maximization or strategic firm behavior and therefore should be reduced either to a market failure or some form of altruism turned out to be incorrect. Quite the opposite: my article in the Journal of Economic Literature jointly written with Jay Shimshack not only shows that CSR constitutes an economically important phenomenon that may well be strategic (i.e. profit maximizing), but also argues that, when concisely defined1, CSR can be efficient. In other words, it can be a viable private channel of public goods provision and a formidable complement or even alternative to classic government intervention.

Not just the domain of entrepreneurs or companies, Corporate Social Responsibility can also impact international development.Development institutions such as the World Bank Group stress that the private sector has an important role to play in the development of an economy, however, the supply of environmental, social or other goods (or the curtailment of bads) with public character is believed to be government and rule rather than market-driven. But what happens when governments and rules fail to provide these goods and services? While, it appears that markets and corporate behavior won’t be able to reach a social optimum e.g. when it comes to pollution or renewable energy levels, they often can do better than governments. In the short and middle term, CSR can be welfare optimal. Eventually improved public politics and CSR may even be mutually reinforcing elements in the longer run.