Corporate Social Responsibility of Public Banking Sector for Sustainable Development

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become a significant field of studies to stress the importance of the new role of organizations towards the society for sustainable development. Nowadays, an enormous number of authors have been participating in this field to highlight the responsibility of organizations towards the community, society and the natural environment where they are operating. Despite the growing number of researches related to CSR in the developed countries little empirical studies have been devoted to examine CSR concept and practice in the African countries, the MENA region (Middle-East and North Africa), as well as in the Golf countries. This chapter seeks to study CSR concept and practice in the emerging market economies (EMEs). It will mainly focus on the implementations of CSR by the public banking sector. We will investigate the role of the public banking sector existing in an Arab country in comparison to an Asian country to explain and analyze the similarities and differences of CSR activities in both experiences. In this comparative study we will primarily examine Banque Misr, as one of the oldest and largest public bank in Egypt and the Malayan Banking Berhad (trading as Maybank) as the largest public bank in Malaysia. After a meticulous review of literature, we propose a systemic framework to study CSR practices and policy implementations. We illustrated the CSR as a constant process where all variables are interrelated and are affecting each other in a mutual approach. In this systemic framework we advocated to study all significant variables related to CSR practice as: the history/philosophy development, core-values, CSR adopted definition, motives, key players, approaches, stakeholders focus, sectors of intervention and mechanisms of policy implementations. The chapter concludes that common CSR policies exist between the Malaysian and the Egyptian experience. Nevertheless the Malaysian model has formulated an elaborated and further sophisticated CSR public banking program. Meanwhile, the Egyptian model needs to adopt more global oriented CSR public banking policies, in particular to assure the sustainable development requirements.