A fresh view of China's OFDI, its motivations and risks thereto.

The aims of this paper are: to examine the key reasons for the locations of and the reasons for China's OFDI as it boomed and became a major OFDI player in the global economy; and, to assess the existence and nature of possible risks to such a boom continuing. The core of the paper, in its second section, is a time-indexed review of findings relating to the first theme noted above. The broad conclusions are that: China's OFDI has been a great success in the period 2005-2019; its motivations have included all the usual possibilities, such as access to resources, market access, access to and reverse engineering of technology (very broadly construed), and access to cheap labour for manufacturing; but, it has also sought to wield political influence via infrastructural investment, and its increasingly hostile attitudes in geopolitical terms in the past decade may pose consequential threats to a continuation of the success to date.

Does CSR Activity Amount to Socially Responsible Management?

In essence firms or companies are usually thought to exist to make products for or provide services of some sort to third parties, other companies or individuals. The philosophical question which naturally arises then is 'to the benefit of whom should a firm's activities be aimed?' Possible answers include the owners of the firm, the firm's employees or wider society, the firm's local community or their host nation. It is because of firms' location within a wider society that the issue of corporate social responsibility arises. The issue is do they contribute in a positive way to the fabric of society. In this paper we conduct an exploratory investigation whose research questions, broadly, are whether there is public evidence of corporate social responsibility activity by firms listed in the UK and to what extent, if any, such activities may amount to genuinely socially responsible management by the firms. We examined the most up to date annual reports of a split sample of 36 firms listed in the FTSE 350. The short answers to the two research questions above are: to some degree and no by some margin, based on data from the sample firms.