The Geography of NGO Activism against Multinational Corporations

Sophie Hatte and Pamina Koenig

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) regularly denounce the behavior of multinational corporations throughout the world, however their motivations for choosing the targets of their campaigns remain largely unknown. Using a new and rich dataset listing activists' campaigns towards multinational firms, we reveal important regularities in the geography and internationalization of advocacy NGOs activity. For example, 49\% of US NGOs select a foreign target firm, however, 75\% of campaigns targeting foreign firms involve an action taking place in the country of the NGO. We build on these facts to analyze the country-level determinants of NGOs campaigns, and estimate a triadic gravity equation for campaigns, involving the NGO, firm and action countries. Our variables of interest are the bilateral links between the country pairs, measuring how well the audience of the NGO identifies to the target of the campaign. Our results reveal a campaigning bias towards home firms and firms originating from familiar countries.

Keywords: gravity equation; multinational firms; NGOs campaigns; microeconomy of globalization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hme and nep-int
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-01518148v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://shs.hal.science/halshs-01518148v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Geography of NGO Activism against Multinational Corporations (2020)
Working Paper: The Geography of NGO Activism against Multinational Corporations (2020)
Working Paper: The Geography of NGO Activism against Multinational Corporations (2020)
Working Paper: The Geography of NGO Activism against Multinational Corporations (2017)
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:hal:wpaper:halshs-01518148

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().