• emerging multinationals
• corporate social responsability

The majority of the literature has focused on the adoption of CSR by large corporations belonging to the Western world. In the last decade, however, we have witnessed a growing attention to multinationals from emerging countries (EMNEs)’ engagement with CSR policies. Scholars have recently investigated the extent of the phenomenon and whether CSR practices could also be applied to them.
The original misconception was to think that CSR could be applied to EMNEs, with no adaptation to such contexts, which also has led to assume that the drivers of CSR engagement would have been the same in advanced and emerging economies.
In reality, very little research has investigated these issues with respect to EMNEs and much of the evidence tends to be anecdotal. As a matter of fact, issues such as ''respect for human rights'' and ''protection of the environment'', which are rooted in a Western culture, are still at an embryonic stage in emerging countries, since other concerns take priority (e.g. improve air and water quality, increased employment, more effective administration, increased growth, eradication of poverty, higher living standards, ecc).
The purpose of this work is to analyze the factors driving the engagement in CSR activities by using original data on a sample of EMNEs from BRIC countries.