THE EVALUATION OF THE CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITIES OF NIGERIAN BANKS

Abstract

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has gradually become a widely acknowledged concept for describing the roles corporate businesses play in ensuring the sustainability of their environment, society and the other stakeholders. Evaluating CSR is multifaceted: it could be in the area of impact, perception or commitment. This research limits itself to the commitment aspect of evaluation by assessing the expenditures of Nigerian banks on CSR. A methodological approach was adopted through panel data of cross sectional six banks and time series of ten years (2008 -2017). A convenience and purposive sampling technique was used to arrive at top six commercial banks in Nigeria for this purpose. The banks are Zenith Bank, First Bank, Guaranty Trust Bank, Access Bank, United Bank for Africa, and the Diamond Bank. Thus, the gross earnings, profit after tax, as well as the CSR expenditures of the banks were extracted from their annual and/ or CSR reports for the periods. The Hausman test was conducted to arrive at the Random Effect Model for the regression analysis of the dependent variable (CSR) and the two independent variables (PAT and gross earnings). Most importantly, profit after tax was statistically discovered to have negative and insignificant impact on CSR. While, gross earning was proven to have a positive and significant effect on CSR expenditure. It was therefore recommended that a uniform framework for executing and measuring CSR expenditures be created in order to improve the level of Nigerian banking industry commitment to social welfare.