CORPORATE SOCIAL INVESTMENT IN THE REGIONAL ECONOMY

Abstract

This article, based on a summary of practical experience and clarification of theoretical aspects, examines the specifics of corporate social investment in the regional economic system. It is noted that social investment that meets the criteria of voluntary participation, project management, and systemicity is the most hierarchically significant form of expressing corporate social responsibility, contributing to the formation of commercial effects based on the transmission mechanism of reputational capital, while excluding the need for goal-setting in achieving direct economic results. The main stakeholders of social investment are recognized as corporate structures, regional authorities, local communities, and workforces, each of which generates a set of positive effects that ensure an increase in reputational capital, the fulfillment of social obligations, an improvement in the standard of living, and the expansion of social guarantees. Implementing corporate social investment at the regional level is the most effective form of expressing socially responsible behavior, as regional scales reduce the risk of erosion of positive results, and the growth of reputational capital based on targeted financing of targeted social projects allows for the formation of investment effects in the medium term. The authors of the work highlighted aspects of the relevance of implementing social investments within the territory of business presence, systematized strategies of corporate social investment depending on the type of management, reflecting the degree of involvement of companies in regional social processes, formed a regional model of corporate social investments, characterizing typical practices of Russian experience of socially responsible behavior of companies, analyzed the experience and results of implementing social investments in the economic system of the Kursk region using the example of socially responsible behavior of individual business entities.