Sustainable Growth and CSR Strategies in Japan

No.238
September 2005
Research Fellow Takafumi Ikuta
Research Fellow Kazunori Minetaki

1. In conjunction with rising awareness of corporate social responsibility (CSR), Japanese businesses are accelerating efforts to create CSR management frameworks through such means as non-financial reporting and the development of response apparatuses. However, even for such progressive businesses, responses are centered on risk management and compliance, and their views concerning competitive superiority and business chances are tenuous. The capacity to contribute proposals for supporting sustainable growth of the world is itself the source of businesses' competitiveness, and solutions to the issues currently threatening sustainable growth-issues of the environment, safety, family, and human resources-are expected to come from the business sector.
2. The important issue for supplying the goods and services that will support sustainable growth lies in evaluating such goods and services from the perspective of potential sustainability. In the automobile and IT industries for instance, including environmental and safety concerns, there are many issues with the potential to appeal to consumers through values. As a support policy for market growth, publicizing information on social value, pre-emptive purchasing through the government, international information transmission, the formation of broad research networks, and other possibilities must be investigated.
3. Concerning CSR-related family and human resource issues, this report empirically analyzes the issues surrounding increasing employability and diverse employment structures (such as telework). From the perspective of businesses' productivity, the results validate the effectiveness of both the enforcement of intra-company education coinciding with the IT shift, as well as the diffusion of teleworking. This signifies the importance of grappling with issues such as increasing employee capabilities and diverse employment structures (teleworking) for businesses.

More Informations

• Japanese
• Full text is not available in English for this report.
  The original Japanese full text is PDF here [927 KB].
  Please let us know the serial number of this report (238) to submit a request for translation.