STUDY ON SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT WITHIN AGRICULTURAL SMEs IN THE SOUTH-MUNTENIA REGION, ROMANIA

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) can be a basic element of regional sustainable development (SD), but this aspect is conditioned by the authorities' support. Even if, at present, social responsibility isn't well known and implemented in Romania, through a good cooperation between the public sector, the private one and the authorities, it is possible to increase the standard of living of the local population, especially for the inhabitants of rural environment. In order to assess the level of knowledge and applicability of CSR campaigns, a 19-question questionnaire has been drawn up and distributed online and physically, in order to obtain as many responses as possible. By addressing the questionnaire to a category with a good representativeness in the South-Muntenia Region, namely that of the managers of SMEs in the agricultural sector, it turned out that the interest in these subjects is low, in a first phase only 51 responses were obtained online, which means 7.29% from the requests. After the second stage, that of physical meetings, a total of 321 responses were received, i.e. 53.14%. As a result of the investigation, it can be concluded that the agricultural managers of the South-Muntenia Region don't have confidence in the success of social responsibility actions, as a result they don't want to allocate a part of their turnover to set this mechanism in motion, especially since about 20% of those interviewed aren't interested in the sustainable development of the region.