ALBERT

Description: Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a praised and promoted business behavior nowadays, widely understood as the entrepreneurs’ and managers’ attempts to make amends for some of the excesses that their economic activities bring about, for instance with regard to environmental negative externalities or to public ecological assets under-provision. It is of utmost importance to duly process and profess the CSR concept, one placed at a subtle interplay between business profitability and civic/social responsibility, between economic and ethical/legal realms, since the misrepresentation of economic agents’ benchmark of proper conduct might harm both social landscape and ecological environment. Still, despite its rich occurrence in scholarly literature as well as recurrence in business practices, CSR requires both further and thorough clarification, since many studies postulate that the free-market mindset is rather dismissive of CSR solicitudes. The current research paper fills such a sensitive conceptual gap by explaining why CSR regards are logically compatible with the free markets, with no reason to decree a market failure in this matter. The work takes the form of an analytical research, of an explicitly conceptual nature, based on praxeologically-deductive argumentation, documenting the fundamental compatibility of CSR with the free market order, populated by profit-driven capitalist corporations that, far from being reckless, are disciplined by the rule of law of clearly defined, defended, divestible property rights. As such, the plea adopted the methodological acquis of the Austrian School of law and economics. The main findings of the present study reveal that (a) in economic commonsense, the “profit motive” is the prima facia rule of judiciousness as the care for third-parties’ welfare can be ensured only after own well-being has been secured, while (b) ethically, “social responsibility”, as an extra-contractual duty, does build up on top of, not as trade-off with a robust property rights order.

Description: The European Union (EU) remains one of the leading-edge jurisdictions on the planet in legislating and enforcing the circular economy, a token of its forthright environmental awareness. Still, given that the level of economic development across the EU member states is heterogenous, this concern, however generous it may be, looks too beyond “their” means and too ahead of “its” times. What the European policymakers seem to disregard is that top-down institutional constructions, as is the case with the EU’s overambitious environmental legislation, can end up in severe distortions. Imposing/importing an institutionalized arrangement without due preparation may fuel resistance to (even positive) change, as the biases it engenders translate into considerable costs and selective benefits. The present article attempts a novel approach within the literature, where the failure to achieve recycling targets is usually considered the fault of private businesses. Instead, our study explains suboptimal environmental results by the institutionalization of spiraling governmental interventions in markets, meant to make the arbitrarily set recycling/reuse targets artificially viable. Subject to EU rules, Romania’s packaging waste recycling market is a textbook case in revealing this outcome predicted by economic theory, as our statistical data suggest. The conclusion is that it is equally perilous to neglect the calibration of legislative targets according to institutional and economic development as it is to reject environmental claims based on their costs.