The primary objective of this paper is to empirically examine whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) influences corporate tax avoidance (CTA) of Chinese listed companies. The study is based on a sample of 3481 firm-year observations from 2009 to 2015 using CSR ratings from the Rankins (RKS) corporate social responsibility ratings agency in China, and all financial data extracted from the China Stock Market and Accounting Research (CSMAR). The authors foundthat CSR is negatively related to the current and cash effective tax rate (proxies of corporate tax avoidance), suggesting that responsible firms are more involved in tax avoidance as compared to less responsible firms. Their findings are robust against different control variables. Additionally, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the paper is one of the first to document an empirical association between CSR and corporate tax avoidance of Chinese listed companies.

The concept of Corporate Social Responsibility covers a wide range of actions which have been practiced for many years in Western countries. As well as in other developing and transitional countries, the concept of social responsibility emerged in Romania after 1990, concurrently with the setup of many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the entrance of multinational companies and was rapidly adopted by several firms. The main purpose of our paper is to investigate practices and actions related to social responsibility, which are undertaken by small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Romania and to reveal which factors really matter in determining different degrees of involvement in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) actions. The level of social responsibility actions undertaken by SMEs often depends on the decisions of their managers and the value orientation of the entrepreneur. Moreover, the younger a firm is, the less likely it is that it gets involved in CSR. This is our main assumption: young ventures display a weaker propensity for CSR actions. In order to validate this hypothesis, we used survey data, collected from 84 SMEs, operating in Oradea, Romania. Data were collected between July-September 2016 and analysed by the authors through correlations, independent sample T-tests and linear regression modelling. Our findings reveal that there are significant differences between newly established ventures and those with a longer history; however, age is not a determining factor of CSR. Although, in the literature, there is no clear consensus regarding whether there is a different model of implementation of CSR related practices in developing and transitional countries, especially in the case of SMEs, our results show there are no essential differences between the models of CSR involvement as these are known in the theory and practice of developed countries.

Prior studies in the contemporary literature have largely ignored the important role of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in shaping employees’ views of self and nature. Although researchers have recently started to pay considerable attention to explore the link between CSR and environmental sustainability, determining how CSR can be effective in shaping the proenvironmental behavior of employees that is missing in the existing literature. The objective of the present research study is to test the impact of microlevel CSR activities to induce environmental performance of an organization with a mediating effect of employees’ pro-environmental behaviors. This study argues that CSR activities of an organization motivate the workers to rethink the relationship between self and nature; hence, they are encouraged to participate in activities that are helpful in terms of preserving the environment, such as participating in pro-environmental activities at the workplace. The proposed model of the study was tested in the banking sector of Pakistan and analyzed by using the structural equation modeling (SEM) technique in AMOS software. The results revealed that microlevel CSR activities, using employee proenvironmental behaviors as a mediator, directly and indirectly influence environmental performance of a bank. The results of the present study are helpful for policymakers of different banking institutions to understand how they can reduce the environmental footprint of their bank by using a well-planned CSR program that can induce transcendent emotions in employees to create a sustainable environment.

National and global health policies are increasingly recognizing the key role of the environment in human health development, which is related to its economic and social determinants, such as income level, technical progress, education, quality of jobs, inequality, education or lifestyle. Research has shown that the increase of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) per capita can provide additional funds for health but also for environmental protection. However, often, economic growth is associated with the accelerated degradation of the environment, and this in turn will result in an exponential increase in harmful emissions and will implicitly determine the increasing occurrence of non-communicable diseases (NCDs), mainly cardiovascular diseases, cancers and respiratory diseases. In this paper, we investigate the role and effects of economic growth, environmental pollution and non-communicable diseases on health expenditures, for the case of EU (European Union) countries during 2000–2014. In order to investigate the long-term and the short-term relationship between them, we have employed the Panel Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) method. Using the Pedroni-Johansen cointegration methods, we found that the variables are cointegrated. The findings of this study show that economic growth is one of the most important factors influencing the health expenditures both in the long- and short-run in all the 28 EU countries. With regards to the influence of CO2 emissions on health expenditure, we have found a negative impact in the short-run and a positive impact on the long-run. We have also introduced an interaction between NCDs and environmental expenditure as independent variable, a product variable. Finally, we have found that in all the three estimated models, the variation in environmental expenditure produces changes in NCDs’ effect on health expenditure.

Recent years have witnessed continuous rise in adopting green innovations which is considered as an important organizational instrument to achieve profits by reducing environmental deterioration. However, green innovation in developing countries, especially in Pakistan, is surprisingly scant as compared to developed countries. This paper empirically investigated obstacles to green innovations in Pakistani manufacturing firms. Specifically, a novel three phase methodological framework was applied to investigate significant barriers and filtration by integrating Delphi method (DM), interpretive structural modeling (ISM), and cross-impact matrix multiplication applied to classification (MICMAC). Our results highlighted that lack of enforceable laws regarding returned goods and recycled products, lack of rules and regulations for green practices, and lack of collaboration with government and environmental institutions are most critical barriers. However, fear of failure about green innovation is least important barriers to green innovations adoption. This study offers interesting clues to promote green innovation in manufacturing industry.