Corporate Sustainability Performance of Chinese Firms: An Empirical Analysis from a Social Responsibility Perspective

ABSTRACT

Drawing on the concepts of sustainable corporate development and the triple bottom line, this study develops a corporate sustainability efficiency (CSE) index to evaluate sustainable corporate performance. Further, with the help of a meta-frontier analysis and a hybrid measure approach, the study identifies the existence and determinants of efficiency gaps introduced by technology heterogeneity across the sectors. The findings, obtained from empirical tests based on panel data of 138 large Chinese firms in 2011–2015, indicate that firms’ CSE was low during the twelfth five-year plan (2011–2015). The best performance was in manufacturing, followed by construction/mining, services, and finance, while technology heterogeneity caused significant efficiency gaps across industries. The study also identifies various managerial failures and a technology gap that contributed to the lack of efficiency gains before offering context-specific suggestions.

KEY WORDS:

• Chinese firms
• corporate social responsibility
• corporate sustainability efficiency
• meta-frontier analysis
• technology heterogeneity

Additional information

Funding

The authors are grateful for the support provided by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71704010, 71771024, and 71873103), the Humanities and Social Science project of Ministry of Education of China (17YJC630163 and 18YJC910011), the Social Science Research Foundation of Beijing (18JDYJB021, 17JDGLA010) and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (FRF-TP-18-007A2).