Corporate Social Responsibility in the Oil Industry: A Comparison of the CSR Disclosure Behavior in BP and CNPC

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss the corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities in UK and China by exploring the main differences of the CSR disclosure behavior between British Petroleum (BP) and China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC). We find that the CSR disclosure reporting of CNPC needs to be improved in many aspects such as the disclosure form, the disclosure content quality, and the negative information disclosure, compared to that of BP. The lack of CNPC’s CSR disclosure could be attributed to poor CSR awareness of the public and companies in China, the inexperienced CSR development in China, and the defective legislation of Chinese laws and regulations on CSR reporting.