A/HRC/4/35 page 20 V. SELF-REGULATION 63. In addition to legal standards, hard or soft, the mandate of the Special Representative includes evolving social expectations regarding responsible corporate citizenship, including human rights. One key indicator consists of the policies and practices that business itself adopts voluntarily, triggered by its assessment of human rights-related risks and opportunities, often under pressure from civil society and local communities. This section maps such standards of self-regulation.55 64. However, mapping the entire universe of business enterprises is impossible. More than 77,000 transnational corporations currently span the globe, with roughly 770,000 subsidiaries and millions of suppliers.56 Those numbers are dwarfed by local firms, and an even bigger informal sector in developing countries. 65. Therefore, the Special Representative conducted studies of a subset of business entities to determine how they perceive corporate responsibility and accountability regarding human rights. One was a questionnaire survey of the Fortune Global 500 firms (FG500), which are under social scrutiny as the world’s largest companies. The second (“business recognition study”) consisted of three parts: actual policies, rather than questionnaire responses, of a broader cross-section of firms from all regions (including developing countries) screened as likely to have policies that include human rights; eight collective initiatives that include human rights standards, like the Fair Labor Association (FLA) or the International Council on Metals and Mining (ICMM); and the human rights criteria employed by five socially responsible investment funds (SRI funds).57 66. Such a mapping could barely have been done five years ago because few corporate human rights policies existed. Uptake has been especially rapid among large global firms, a group still predominantly domiciled in Europe, North America and Japan. Newer entrants from other regions lag behind, although it is unclear whether this lag reflects a fundamental difference or merely timing. Numerous firms in the business recognition study only recently joined initiatives like the Global Compact and are only beginning to develop human rights policies. And the FG500 survey demonstrates that there is substantial policy diffusion in this domain: fewer than half of the respondents indicated having experienced “a significant human rights issue” themselves, yet almost all reported having policies or management practices in place relating to human rights. 55 The section responds to paras. 1 (a) and (e) of Commission resolution 2005/69. 56 UNCTAD, World Investment Report, 2006, at: www.unctad.org/wir. 57 The FG500 survey is summarized in A/HRC/4/35/Add.3; the other three studies are reported in HRC/4/35/Add.4. Sampling and other methodological issues are also discussed there.