Corporate social responsibility: Trends in global reporting initiative standards

This paper reviews and analyzes the relevant literature concerning corporate social responsibility (CSR). Different aspects are examined in terms of CSR and a firm’s performance, size, disclosure–reporting and communications and other recent trends in reporting. In addition to reviewing these issues we describe the diffusion of the global reporting initiatives worldwide identifying the trends in the period 1999–2017 for each continent. Specifically, we perform a trend analysis for all continents exploring the mean change in all sectors in both large multinational and small medium sized enterprises with global reporting responsibilities for the period 1999–2017. Additionally, a proposed modified national index of CSR is presented and discussed. Europe is shown to have passed from a full-grown to a downturn stage in recent years. A similar but less pronounced trend is evident in the cases of Oceania and Northern America, while Asia is shown to be in a spreading out stage with a steady expansion. Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa have reached a full grown stage. These realizations of (spreading out, full grown and downturn) global reporting diffusion together with the proposed national index of CSR may help decision makers to recognize companies’ understanding of their activities on the economy, environment and society and thereby potentially link it with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.