Abstract:
The feature of doing business in current economic conditions requires the development of new tools, which allows evaluating not only economic but also environmental and social aspects of its activities. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is observed as one of those tools. It is proved that additional costs of the company related to the financing the CSR activities have a positive impact on its competitiveness. The hypothesis is advanced that the main role of socially responsible business is the creation of evolutionary transition from socially responsible investing to impact investing. The analysis of development trends of social investment in the world has allowed noting the importance of implementation of impact investment’s provisions in practice of Russian companies, as opposed to foreign companies, in Russia impact investing is still insufficiently developed. The results of the comparative analysis of socially responsible and impact investing allowed identifying the advantages of impact investing over socially responsible investing. Based on the analysis of comparison results, it was found that socially responsible investments are passive in nature, and the impact of investments are active in nature. The developed set of indicators to assess the impact of investments of energy companies allowed evaluating the economic, environmental and social performance of companies that generate competitive advantages in the new economic environment.
