CSR practices in Polish and Spanish stock listed companies: A comparative analysis

Abstract

In recent years, many studies have been carried out on corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting by enterprises. However, none of the previous surveys have covered CSR reporting in countries in Western Europe (Spain) and Central Europe (Poland). In our research, we looked for answers to two research questions. The first was aimed at answering whether the industry represented by a given company influenced the number of disclosures in CSR reporting. The second question was to answer whether there were differences between Poland and Spain in the amount of disclosure in CSR reporting. We carried out a statistical analysis of the collected research material, under which we performed non-parametric tests as all of the variables for the distribution were not normal (Shapiro-Wilk test). We performed both the U Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis tests, which allowed us to answer our questions. The obtained results indicated that enterprises from the fuel and energy sectors as well as the financial industry provided more CSR disclosure than the other industries. There was a significant difference in the number of CSR disclosures between Poland and Spain, where more disclosures in CSR reporting were recorded in Spain.