Analysis of oil and gas companies’ corporate social responsibility practices in Russia

Purpose: to develop an approach to identifying and assessing the best corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices aimed at improving the social and environmental performance of enterprises and having a positive impact on the financial results and risks of companies.

Methods: the authors conducted a regression analysis to identify key CSR indicators affecting a company's financial results, and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to analyze the comparative effectiveness of CSR practices and identify the most successful practices in terms of the balance between key CSR indicators and financial results.

Results: an algorithm for identifying the best CSR practices was proposed. In particular, according to the GRI standard, ESG factors of the oil and gas sector were selected provided that they had been included in reports from 2012 to 2023; profit was chosen as an endogenous indicator; the presence of a relationship between the profit indicator and the selected ESG factors was assessed using correlation and regression analysis; based on the modelling results, the factors that are most closely functionally related to the result were selected and used as input variables for the DEA; the DEA method was used to select companies with the most effective CSR practices; a comparative analysis was conducted to identify the best practices of CSR and recommendations were suggested for oil and gas companies CSR practices development.

Conclusions and Relevance: as a result of the research, an approach was developed to identify successful CSR practices taking into account their relationship with the financial results of companies using the example of the oil and gas sector. The developed algorithm can also be used for companies in other industries, provided that these companies implement CSR and provide non-financial reporting. The assessment of CSR practices efficiency is supplemented by an in-depth analysis of specific CSR activities of benchmark companies.  

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