O amor em tempos coléricos: a relação entre a responsabilidade social corporativa e a agressividade tributária em países emergentes

Abstract

This study aimed to analyze the relationship between Corporate Social Responsibility and tax aggressiveness in emerging countries, to understand whether there is a relationship between the aggressive tax behavior of organizations and behaviors considered offensive and immoral by society, and to mask these actions through the adoption of practices towards sustainability. The study was based on the Theory of Legitimacy because organizations may want to reduce or avoid possible reputational damage caused by the reduction of taxes, which are the object of social pressure. It was found that the international literature addressed the relationship only in developed countries, with no research focusing on emerging countries. The study was grounded in a sample of 152 companies listed on stock exchanges in emerging countries between 2016 and 2021, totaling 912 observations. The econometric model was settled in balanced panel data with the use of random effects, with the intention of attesting greater robustness to the estimators since the international literature presents divergent results in the relationship between the association of CSR and tax aggressiveness. Three dependent variables were used to measure aggressive tax behavior to interact with the CSR proxy, extracted from the Refinitiv® database. The results showed the absence of a correlation between tax aggressiveness and CSR because there was no statistical significance in any model. To verify the results, two robustness tests were used, but the data did not show statistical significance. The absence of statistical significance in this association had already been evidenced in the international literature because the payment of taxes corresponds to business responsibility since the common denominator between them is corporate ethics. Only the profitability variable was statistically significant and negative in all models, allowing the interpretation that, in developing countries, there is a tendency for the lower the profitability, the lower the tax aggressiveness.