Corporate social responsibility for the PSI 20 Portuguese companies

Abstract

In Europe, the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) issue was boosted by Jacques Delors in the Green Paper on social responsibility. Two dimensions were defined, the internal and the external ones, which include several aspects of what should be considered in the CSR performance assessment. Following the global market trend, Portuguese companies are also aware of these issues and report their social responsibility activities, although currently there are no social and sustainable indicators to assess the Portuguese CRS performance.

The purpose of this paper is to present a multivariate analysis and to verify homogenous groups of companies with identical social responsibility. The study focused on 19 of companies in the Portuguese Stock Index PSI 20 and the analysis covered a period of five years, between 2005 and 2009. The results showed that 3 clusters were identified.