Sustainability issues in the ethical codes of hypermarkets

Emese Gulyás ()
Additional contact information
Emese Gulyás: Association of Conscious Consumers Budapest Hungary

Society and Economy, 2011, vol. 33, issue 1, 111-129

Abstract: Large retail chains have become the dominant purchasing places for Hungarian consumers. At the same time when the first large scale retail unit was opened in Hungary the first critical voices were heard on the environmental effects of hypermarkets. In the new century economic critiques have overtaken the environmental ones. In countries with longer history of retail chains and market economies the most intensive discussion is about the social effects of big box retailing. Nonetheless these social debates have had almost no effect on the Hungarian regulation of large retail chains, yet some of the problems are addressed by self-regulation. This paper consists of two parts. First it gives an overview of the critical academic literature on the effects of large retail chains on the environment, on communities and on local economies. Second it analyses how these problems are reflected in industrial self-regulation, namely in the codes of ethics of retail companies.

Keywords: sustainability; retail chain; hypermarket; ethical code; code of ethics; self-regulation; Hungary (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
Note: The research has been supported by the Norwegian Financial Mechanism (project HU-0056). The author is grateful for the research assistance to Ágnes Mérõ-Herman and to Zsófia Perényi.
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.akademiai.com/content/j802313u25564427/fulltext.pdf (application/pdf)
subscription

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aka:soceco:v:33:y:2011:i:1:p:111-129

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
Akadémiai Kiadó Zrt., P. O. Box 245, H-1519 Budapest, Hungary
https://akjournals.com/

Access Statistics for this article

Society and Economy is currently edited by Szent-Iványi, Balázs

More articles in Society and Economy from Akadémiai Kiadó, Hungary
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kriston, Orsolya ().