Corporate social responsibility disclosure in emerging countries. Evidence from a content analysis of chinese CSR and annual reports

The purpose of this paper is to examine the CSR and Annual Reports of the largest Chinese companies and to provide evidence about their socio-environmental’ performances disclosure. We read a sample of 200 EMNCs Reports in order to define, through a Grounded Theory approach, a dictionary of 1,154 keywords; then we integrated it with a set of keywords drawn from the literature. We grouped the final list of keywords in 24 sub-categories, which then form 4 more general categories (corporate, economic, environmental, social). Finally, we used this custom dictionary to set an automatic content analysis of 452 Chinese firms’ CSR or Annual Reports. In this paper, we discuss the content analysis results in detail, by also showing how the CSR Communication differs across different industries. Future research lines are presented.