Question

What do you think, from an investor viewpoint, that pharmaceutical firms should direct any of their efforts to the social responsibility project? with references

800 words

Answer 1

Most pharmaceutical companies currently practice CSR by taking a “triple bottom line” approach of environmental, social, and economic strategies to manage their businesses and produce an overall positive impact.

In today’s competitive economic environment, where increasingly stakeholders including investors scrutinize pharmaceutical firms’ environmental and social performance, CSR is a crucial strategy. The findings can help corporate managers make strategic CSR decisions to optimize benefits for their organization.

As pharmaceutical firms experience increasing civil society pressure to act responsibly in a changing globalized world, many are expanding and/or reforming their corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies. We sought to understand how multinational pharmaceutical companies currently engage in CSR activities in the developing world aimed at global health impact, their motivations for doing so and how their CSR strategies are evolving.

CSR is of increasing importance for multinational pharmaceutical firms yet understanding of the array of CSR strategies employed and their effects is nascent. Our study points to the need to (i) develop clearer and more standardized definitions of CSR in global health (2) strengthen indices to track CSR strategies and their public health effects in developing countries and (iii) undertake more country level studies that investigate how CSR engages with national health systems.

Pharmaceutical companies are special cases because their business decisions directly impact human health, making CSR efforts particularly important. These firms have been criticized for specific behaviors such as setting prohibitively high prices and sluggishness in responding to demands to provide access to life saving drugs for poor populations. In response, at least in part, during the past two decades pharmaceutical companies have significantly increased CSR efforts, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) that bear the large majority of the global disease burden. Recent epidemiological and demographic shifts, notably the HIV/AIDS pandemic, have magnified pressures to actively work to promote societal well-being.