Local global watchdogs: Trade, sourcing and the internationalization of social activism

NGO campaigns criticizing firms for infringements along their internationalized value chains are a salient feature of economic globalization. We argue that understanding the international patterns of NGO campaigns requires accounting for the geography of their targets’ economic activities. We propose a model of global sourcing and international trade in which heterogeneous NGOs campaign against heterogeneous firms in response to infringements along their value chains. We find that campaigns are determined by a triadic gravity equation involving the country of the NGO, the country of the firm as well as the sourcing country. Importantly, independent of the location of the NGO, trade costs between the supplier and the firm shape the patterns of NGO campaigns. We use recently available data to estimate our triadic gravity equation at the NGO level and find strong support for this prediction as well as for other predictions specific to our modeling approach.