The impact of multinational companies from Romania on increasing the level of corporate social responsibility awareness

The Romanian business scene has recently borrowed the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR), and this evolution was due to the presence of multinational companies (MNCs) that implemented new practices and activities in this area. Our paper aims to provide a presentation of social responsibility in Romania, based on public reports of multinational companies, studies and reports of several institutions involved, foreign and Romanian literature or websites and other media sources. After a short review of the literature on the CSR issue, we have described the main coordinates of CSR implementation within the Romanian business environment: authorities and institutions involved in the process, types of initiatives/actions undertaken by MNCs from Romania, and high priority domains of society that benefit from the support of MNCs. A general image of the stage of CSR development in Romania was captured by a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis on the subject. In the final section of our paper, we analysed the case of Petrom OMV Company, the top CSR player in Romania in recent years, in an attempt to prove that we can find remarkable examples of suitable practices and that these experiences must be disseminated within the overall Eastern European business environment.