THE socio-economic outlook for the post-Covid-19 era is bleak. The coronavirus has plunged the economy into deep recession all over the world.
Millions of people are now unemployed in developed and developing countries. Malaysia is no exception.
The Covid-19 pandemic is ferocious. Many people have been pushed back below the poverty line. They are now living in destitution, and their condition is continuing to deteriorate. Can they survive? No one can predict when and to what extent our livelihoods will return to pre-Covid-19 days.
The federal government has promised crucial assistance to the rakyat in the last two months. Many economists do not doubt the recovery is not V-shaped. We even must rule out a U-shaped recovery. This is not a doomsday prediction, but a realistic view. Putrajaya still can render additional help.
However, the government's resources are limited. We can work more with the government in transforming our society in post-corona days. In this new landscape, individuals, corporates, social entrepreneurs, non-governmental community-based organisations, and others can take a bigger role in social responsibility, in reciprocity, in cooperation, in social justice, equality, and harmony in our pluralistic homeland. Hence, I want to give special emphasis on the social responsibility of business organisations.
In order to build a more resilient social economic environment in our homeland, we need to further strengthen the contribution of the corporate world in corporate social responsibility (CSR). I am not bloviating.
Dr Irma Yazreen at UNIMAS says: "The private sector, which is the collection of profit seeking corporations, plays a major role in driving economic activities".
Notwithstanding, in order to elevate CSR to a higher plateau, Bursa Malaysia established a requirement for all companies that are listed in its stock exchange to disclose their CSR activities starting in 2007.
A few years ago, Dr Irma and I showed that there were more contributions from the corporate sector in supporting non-profit driven activities that enhanced the wellbeing of social, economic, political and environmental spheres in recent years.
We created a multi-dimensional CSR index in measuring the CSR performances of the Top 100 Public Listed Companies (PLCs) in market capitalisation in Malaysia. The index covers economic prosperity, the marketplace, the community, the workplace and the environment. Our findings are categorised into three different rankings: market capitalisation, unweighted and weighted. The rankings in the second group were different from the third group, except Public Bank.
We conclude that the Top 100 PLCs' awareness and willingness to strengthen CSR activities in terms of their approaches and scope are low, despite the requirements mandated by Bursa Malaysia. The demand for corporate support in society – particularly in areas that have not been attended to sufficiently by government sectors and non-for-profit organisations – is enormous.
We found that most of the Top 100 PLCs chose to focus their support on charitable activities. It is plausible to say that this kind of exposure enhances their corporate images and hence, it is a good incentive for the Top 100 PLCs. In order to diversify corporates' scope of CSR activities – especially in enhancing social justice and equality, in reciprocity, in mutual cooperation, and social harmony – the government, individuals, social entrepreneurs, and community-based organisations have to work more with the corporate world to promote "sustainable society" in post-pandemic Malaysia.
Our socio-economic sphere post-Covid-19 must minimise, if not eliminate, the existential threat of the widening gap between the haves and have nots created by the outbreak.
The corporate community surely can encourage companies to take up a bigger role in CSR activities beyond charitable purposes in specific areas such as: economic inclusion in offering employment opportunities to the poorer strata of people; supporting social entrepreneurs in experience sharing, social scalability and even business partnership; giving resources (beside taxes) for the common good; strengthening the green economy together with government and the society at large.
The era when every company unconditionally claims profit maximisation in competition is its raison d'etre has come to an end. The boundaries among the three players – government, corporates and individuals – overlap in responsibility, reciprocity, mutual respect, and humaneness. Hence, without a doubt, CSR is of and by itself the game changer post-Covid-19.
The writer is a professor at Reitaku University, Tokyo, and has been teaching Southeast Asia studies, international economics, integration, development economics and Asian economy since 1983