Study on Chinese Commercial Bank’s CSR Efficiency and Sustainable Development through Corpus Analysis and DEA Model

Abstract

By applying the efficiency DEA model and corpus analysis tool Antconc into the analysis of Corporate Social Responsibility report (CSR report) and taking commercial banks’ performance of CSR as an input which may bring banks effective output, this research investigates CSR input-output efficiency and the achievement of sustainable development of China’s major commercial banks by means of qualitative, quantitative and comparative analysis on the basis of the outcome of DEA empirical study. DEA model finds that the CSR input efficiency of 6 smaller commercial banks including China Citic Bank (CITIC Bank), Huaxia Bank (HB), China Guangfa Bank (CGB), China Merchants Bank (CMB), China Industrial Bank (CIB)and China Bohai Bank(CBB); the other 9 commercial banks including the 4 big banks in China are the inefficient banks. Then 30 keywords and 6 semantic domains of DEA efficient banks’ CSR reports are summarized relative to DEA inefficient banks’ through corpus tool’s keyword analysis. Based on discursive context of CSR reports and characteristics of commercial banks sustainable development, this research finds that DEA efficient banks achieve a better sustainable development than DEA inefficient banks in corporate culture, stakeholder concern, marketization level, application of Fintech, green finance and business innovation, reference to exterior supervision mechanism. In the end, several advices are given for China commercial banks to improve their CSR input efficiency and achieve sustainable development. Different from the previous single linguistic perspective of CSR report, this study uses corpus tool for text analysis on the basis of empirical research on economic efficiency model. The combination of the two can avoid the subjectivity of traditional linguistic research, making the results of text analysis can more effectively serve the improvement of CSR input efficiency of commercial banks in order to to achieve better sustainable development. At the same time, this research also enriches the study of business discourse analysis such as CSR reports.