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Article

19 Oct 2011

Author:
Yike Qin, CSR Asia

CSR as a national competitiveness: What can Asia learn from Sweden?

Swedish companies have done more than most countries, especially in the areas of climate, conservation, working environment...and social issues...Sweden has high female workforce participation rates and high ratio of females at the executive level in corporations...Swedish companies focus on guiding their supply chain in the process of fulfilling social responsibilities. They believe in that true win-win results can only be achieved by shared responsibility. For example, H&M published its code of conduct in 1997, which also applies to its suppliers and distributors around the world. Child labour, gender equity and so on have all been addressed. Recent research shows that H&M is now ranked as the world’s top user of organic cotton...But if we compare this to China, we can see there were over 700 CSR [Corporate Social Responsibility] reports published in China during 2010, but very few of them have extend their CSR focus to their supply chain downstream or upstream to retailers.