Corporate Social Responsibility in the Economy of Slovakia

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become a worldwide emerging phenomenon, as many businesses truly engaged into CSR understood, that profit making is not their only role. Those firms know, that managing their economic, societal and environmental impact by sustainable behaviour, offers advantages that cannot be bought for money. In the same way, the empirical evidence supports the thought that despite the regional differences, corporate social responsibility significantly contributes to a sound social development, involving the wealth of both, shareholders and stakeholders. Despite the world wide growing importance of CSR, only some research has been conducted dealing with CSR in Slovakia and this field still remains relatively unexplored. As a consequence, our work researches and displays the relationship between the development of Slovak economy and social responsibility of firms. The main aim of this paper was to find out, whether and how is CSR affected by the economic development. As a partial objective, we have researched the effect of the inclusion of socially responsible behavior of firms on Slovakia's competitiveness on the global level. We have found a positive correlation between the Gross Domestic Product of Slovakia and CSR development in Slovakia, as well as a relationship between the Slovak Global Competitiveness and our national standpoint towards responsibility engagement into business - making. For our investigation, we have observed the development of Slovakia since the year 2001 until the end of 2014. The results have shown outcomes comparable to the foreign literature, which suggests that many subjects connected to this phenomenon do still not understand the basis of sustainable behavior properly. Slovak business sector mostly realizes and presents CSR in terms of philanthropy, donating or charity; while the most important message of responsibility engagement into business is different. This issue explains why CSR activities of firms Slovak companies are dependent on the economic development. Following many experts, the relationship should be vice-versa: The economic development of a country should be dependent on corporate social responsibility of businesses. Therefore, based on our findings we have formulated recommendations for policy and decision makers at the highest managerial positions of organizations and businesses to improve this situation and secure a sustainable growth within the framework of carrying behavior of the most important CSR actors in Slovak republic.