THE EVOLUTION OF CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY REPORTING IN THE EUROPEAN UNION

Abstract

Modern society is confronting with problems such as global warming, pollution, contamination of the soil. As a response to these problems, organizations are implementing corporate social responsibility programs, as a way of dealing with these new challenges. CSR reporting began in the 90’s in the USA, but in the last twenty years, EU companies have shown an increasing involvement to a point in which today European CSR reports ammount to 38% of the total reports worldwide. The Global Reporting Initiative is a nongovernmental organism that provides companies which wish to create CSR reports, a set of guidelines and databases what contain CSR reports from 1999 to the present day. As an answer to the need of companies to report their CSR activities, in November 2014, the European Union published Directive 2014/95/EU regarding the obligation of large companies to anually report a series of nonfinancial aspects and information. A priority of the European Comission is to align the CSR reporting method of the member states to the global methods. The comission has evaluated in 2013 the progress of member states and reached the conclusion that member states have chosen different pahts: some have taken only small impact decisions – such as informative and promotional actions for CSR – while other states have taken legislative measures to support corporate social responsibility.

Keywords

• Corporate Social Responsability
• Organization
• Reporting