Businesses, including multinational enterprises, increasingly see the need to have a positive social and environmental impact. Usually this takes the form of what’s known as “Corporate Social Responsibility,” or CSR.

But what are the costs that relate to demanding responsible behaviour?, we ask Bruce Byiers, Senior Policy Officer at the Economic Transformation and Trade programme at ECDPM. Despite not having an easy answer, policy-makers, especially those trying to engage the private-sector in development, need to consider not only the potential costs, but a range of other issues if they want to succeed at promoting CSR, he says. In this podcast, he explains the subsequent challenge of finding the right balance between mandatory and voluntary reporting in the different arenas where business operate and shares the findings of his latest paper.