Choose or lose, another road to China’s sustainable development: A law and economics analysis of corporate sustainability theories and practices

Due to an ongoing series of corporate scandals, which show a broad spectrum of irresponsible business behavior, the corporate community is facing increasing public criticism, distrust and protest. In order to regain public trust, corporations need to internalize their social and environmental responsibilities (CSR/CER) and implement those throughout their business activities.There is an increasing trend of introducing more regulation to accompany a thorough CSR/CER compliance and performance, and various endeavors have already been made in regulating CSR/CER at both the international and the national levels. The development of CSR/CER in China is still in an early stage of development but it already became a prominent issue over the last decade at the policy level and in corporate practices. Analysis of this research also proves a vast potential for a CSR/CER contribution to the existing regulation in China, but the implementation of CSR/CER still faces a variety of challenges.