Corporate social responsibility (CSR)‎ disclosure of Islamic and conventional banks in Kuwait

Abstract EN

This study examines the corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure practices in Islamic and conventional banks.

A content analysis was conducted on secondary data to compare the quality and quantity of CSR disclosure among banks listed on Boursa Kuwait.

Data for this study were drawn from the annual reports of ten banks (five Islamic and five conventional banks) for 2015.

CSR information was classified into four categories : human resources, products and services, community involvement, and environmental issues.

Findings from the descriptive results show that conventional banks provide a higher quality and a greater quantity of CSR information than Islamic banks do regarding human resources and products and service CSR information, whereas Islamic banks deliver a higher quality and a greater quantity of CSR information related to community involvement and environmental issues.

Despite that, the statistical results reveal that the differences in CSR disclosure between both bank types are not significant.

The study provides insights and adds to the literature regarding the quality and quantity of CSR disclosure of banks in a developing country by focusing on the banking sector, which is an important sector in Kuwait’s economy.

And finally, the study is valuable for regulators to improve the quality and quantity of CSR information disclosed by all sectors.

The study focuses only on the CSR disclosure of a limited sample of Kuwait banks in 2015.

Also, the research was limited to annual reports ; however, there are other sources of CSR information.

Third, only one year of the banks’ annual reports was used.