CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY IN RUSSIA: IS IT COSTS OR INVESTMENTS?

The overall result of the work is the justification of the assertion that corporate social responsibility (CSR) of a company should be considered both as the system activity to take into account the interests of its stakeholders, which requires the additional expenses, and as a special form of social capital, the use of which gives an economic effect in the form of growth in the future profitability of business and also actually reduces the risks of the consequences of financial difficulties considered within the classical models of the theory of finance.

A comprehensive methodology for assessing the level of corporate social responsibility has been developed, which allows evaluating the efforts of large enterprises in the social sphere as a whole, according to which the calculation of the integral indicator of CSR is carried out on the basis of the linear aggregating model and the Felix-Riggs score-rating method.

The central result of the work is the development and testing of the methodology for assessing the impact of CSR on the level of business sustainability during and after the crisis. A common feature of large oil producing companies is the implementation of CSR programs and the compilation and publication of social reports. The above facts, including the availability of necessary data in open access, predetermined the choice of the object of study – a group of large and medium-sized Russian oil producing companies.

The key hypothesis of the study is the assertion that the high level of corporate social responsibility of an oil producing company increases its financial stability during the crisis and in the post-crisis period. As an example, the crisis of 2014 in Russia is considered. As a result of regression modeling, it is shown that corporate CSR has a positive effect on the post-crisis dynamics of the corporation’s financial indicators, using the example of a group of oil producing companies in Russia.