Corporate social responsibility in all sectors of the economy: towards responsible macrobehaviour

‘Corporate Social Responsibility in all Sectors of the Economy’ wants to show that CSR should be practiced in all the sectors of the economy and not only in large corporations. The ‘all’ in the title is intended to say that CSR should be extended to public administration whose social responsibility in practice is beyond questioning in most countries of the world. The scope of this study is to make a theoretical point more than producing a comprehensive conspectus of CSR. Acknowledgement of nuances and country variations in the current performance of public administration reinforces the need for CSR to be extended to such sector. The novel idea of CSR is called here ‘Reformulated CSR’: all organisations should provide an explicit account for their value added to society. CSR is the business duty for all organisations to account for their core business’ impact on society. The theoretical underpinning of such definition is identified in the microeconomic concept of market failure and in the sociology of organisations idea of ‘organisational failure’, implying that organisations pursue their own missions with bounded rationality. CSR then is the duty of all organisations to account for their potential conditions of market and organisational failure. Public administration in particular is defined as including the bureaucracy, in the current understanding of it, ranging from the ministries or departments of the central government to state or regional and local government. Public administration also includes the judicial and the services provided by the public sector with their own personnel, such as health care and schools. State owned enterprise (SOE) is of course included in the organisations that should account for their impact, albeit it is not considered public administration. The subtitle ‘Towards Responsible Macrobehaviour’ refers to Schelling’s theory of human interaction and it points to Reformulated CSR as responsible ‘macrobehaviour’

Promoting good public governance and environmental support for sustainable economic development

Good governance promotes the fundamental grounds of participation and democracy in contemporary public administration, whilst institution building and the (in)effectiveness of public administration is linked to economic growth. This synergy brings forth sheer implications on the sustainable economic development. On this composite setting, the paper examines several fundamental credentials of public administration in the European Union (EU) countries, in relation to economic development, but also poverty, research, and development support, as representative socio-economic credentials. The empirical analysis is based on data covering the 1995−2017 lapse of time, processed through three econometric procedures, namely robust regression, structural equation modeling, and Gaussian graphical models. The main results emphasize that there are significant joint implications of public administration on the considered socio-economic dimensions. General government spending and, particularly, the environmental support, have positive implications on the European Union economies, leading to significant increases in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita and downsize in poverty risk (more emphasized in regard to the government expenditures than the environmental protection). Overall, the quality of governance in EU countries requires an additional effort dedicated to leverage good public governance in order to support the long-term economic development