Due to the increasing pressure on multinational corporations (MNCs) to take responsibility for their business operations, many large corporations have started to address the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Accordingly, corporate social disclosure, that is the communication of an organisation’s social and environmental impact through the annual report or similar medium, is an increasingly important issue. The purpose of this thesis is to explore how multinational banks working in Egypt choose to communicate their CSR activities to different stakeholders, and to compare it with local banks. Content analysis has been used to analyse both the annual reports and web pages of both multinational and local banks. CSR was classified into five themes (environmental related, community related, employee related, customer related and investor related).
The results of the empirical work show that there is CSR disclosure in the banking sector in Egypt at both a local and multinational level; all of the banks disclosed some information related to different CSR categories and it was positive information. The results also showed that this social disclosure in the Egyptian banking sector was inadequate and there is still a long way to go. The social information disclosed was far less than leading banks in developed countries. Also, the study indicated that a greater amount of information was provided on the website than in the annual report, especially within multinational banks. These results could be attributed to the voluntary nature of the reporting regime in Egypt
