Abstract
According to the definition that the European Commission (2001) offered us, corporate social responsibility is a set of measures that an organization can adapt, to improve the well-being of its stakeholders and promote the balance of economic, social, and environmental performance. The stakeholder theory clarifies that this decision-making must take into consideration all groups of people, being the only way of having a proportional benefit. Based on this premise, in this study, we intend to unravel the main determinants of corporate social responsibility in 63 Portuguese companies. To accomplish that, we used panel data, withdrawn from the SABI database, in the period comprehended between 2008 and 2018, applying the Probit model and the dynamic GMM for robustness check. The sample is composed of 42 companies that find themselves listed in the Portuguese stock exchange and 21 that do not. We can verify that the outcomes allow the analyses of nine variables, among them, only the audit, the asset rotation ratio, the debt ratio, the size, age, and financial autonomy show themselves as statistically positive in the implementation of corporate social responsibility practices. Even though the outcomes were not what we initially predicted, they revealed the positive impact of such practices. We consider them necessary and a reality that companies should pursue, even for the gains of capital that it might represent. We firmly believe that being socially responsible constitutes an essential practice from which all of us can benefit, contributing to life improvement in the community and for environmental sustainability.
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Notes
The Agenda 21 Local is the local version of Agenda 21. It is a management instrument on the sustainability of each country. In Portugal, it was the Agência Portuguesa do Ambiente who presented, in 2007, the “Guia Agenda 21 Local – Um desafio para todos,” which is a guiding methodology to implement local sustainability systems. Cf. https://apambiente.pt/index.php?ref=17&subref=120&sub2ref=163 e https://apambiente.pt/_zdata/Instrumentos/GestaoAmbiental/A21L/Guia%20Agenda%2021%20Local.pdf
Cf. https://www.big.pt/pdf/Newsletters/Resultados_e_Dividendos.pdf. Information accessed on September 2020.
We thank the reviewers for the valuable suggestions to include robustness test results.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the reviewers and editor for suggestions to help us improve the article.
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The support of the Research Unit on Governance, Competitiveness and Public Policy (UIDB/04058/2020), funded by national funds through FCT—Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, is acknowledged, as all the valuable comments received during the presentation of the article in the ICEEE’2021, International Conference on Economics, Energy and Environment, Cappadocia/Turkey on July 1–3, 2021.
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All authors contributed to the study’s conception and design. Material preparation, data collection, and analysis were performed by CC and MM. The first draft of the manuscript was written by CC; corrections and editing were made by MM, and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Carvalho, C., Madaleno, M. The corporate social responsibility challenge on financial performance: Portuguese business situation. Environ Sci Pollut Res 30, 42965–42982 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-19296-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-19296-7