CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

Corporate Social Responsibility



Corporate Social Responsibility

Definition

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is characterised as the way businesses incorporate communal, ecological, and financial anxieties into their standards and procedures in a clear and accountable manner. It is integral to long-run enterprise development and achievement, and it furthermore performances an significant function in encouraging Canadian standards internationally and assisting to the sustainable development of communities. The Government of Canada works with the Canadian enterprise community, municipal humanity assemblies, with foreign authorities and groups as well as other stakeholders to foster and encourage CSR.(Alesina,2005,1227)

Income Inequality

Income inequality is a major dimension of social stratification and social class. It affects and is affected by many other forms of inequality, such as wealth, power, and status. Income is a major determinant of the life chances, health, and well-being of individuals and families, and varies by social factors such as sex, age, rural/urban location, and race or ethnicity. (Lundberg,1998,292)

On a global level, income inequality is extreme by any measure, with the richest 1% of people in the world receiving as much as the bottom 56%. Within the United States, income inequality is much greater than in most other developed countries. In 2003, the richest 1% received more income than the bottom 40%, and the top 20% of U.S. households received almost half of total income.(Kanbur,2000,791)

Because income is such an integral factor determining access to other resources and overall well-being, it is important for anyone concerned with justice and social change to become informed about the kinds, nature, extent, causes, and consequences of income inequality, the degree to which it can and should be reduced, and the ways in which misconceptions, differing values, and entrenched interests distort public policy regarding income. The focus here is on income inequality in the United States and globally. (Bourguignon,1998,233)

Global Income Inequality

Many development theorists contend that currently high levels of income inequality in developing countries should eventually decline (Simon Kuznets' inverted U-curve). Although the evidence supporting this hypothesis is inconsistent and much debated, with rapid but uneven development taking place in many countries, it is clear that levels of global inequality remain extreme, with persistent high numbers in absolute poverty.

According to the World Bank, nearly 20% of the world's population receives less than $1 per day, and nearly half of humankind lives on less than $2 per day. Such poverty produces low levels of education, sanitation, nourishment, and medical care, and high rates of child labor and exploitation, and child and infant mortality. Approximately 50,000 people, the majority of them children, die daily from preventable causes.

While the poorest one fifth of humanity receives one third of 1% of global income (per capita about $85 per year), the wealthiest countries with only 15% of the world's population receive 80% of global income (about $27,500 per capita). Wealth inequality is even more unequally distributed. According to the United Nations, the assets of the top three billionaires are more than the combined gross national products of all the least developed countries and their 600 million ...