Current DFG-funded research project:
Project Title: “Focal Points in the Identity-Space: NGOs, Trade Policy and the Globalization Backlash ”.
Principal investigator: Sebastian Krautheim.
External cooperation partners: Thierry Verdier and Pamina Koenig (both: Paris School of Economics).
Funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG)
Project no. 552944111.
Start: early 2025.
Past DFG-funded research project:
Project Title: “Global Production and its Watchdogs: Firms and NGOs in the Regulatory Void”.
Principal investigator: Sebastian Krautheim.
External cooperation partners: Thierry Verdier and Pamina Koenig (both: Paris School of Economics).
Funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG)
Project no. 421074032.
Start: April 2020.
End: October 2023.
The last three decades have been characterized by an unprecedented internationalization of the production process. Its regulation (e.g. regarding labor or the environment), however, remained mainly on the national level. Locating production in different countries therefore allows firms to benefit from massive cross-country differences in regulation and enforcement capacity: the “regulatory void”.
This has set the stage for a novel, non-governmental player in the international economic policy arena which has previously received little attention in research on international trade: advocacy (or: watchdog) NGOs like Greenpeace, Rainforest Action Network or Amnesty International etc. These groups have adjusted their strategies to the internationalization of production and increasingly influence firms directly through (the threat of) campaigns and consumer boycotts, instead of targeting national regulation.
We place this under-researched novel agent in the economic policy arena and its interaction with internationally active firms at center-stage of our analysis. The two key research questions which also structure this proposal are:
1. How do firms organize international production when the global regulatory void allows for substantial cost savings at the expense of workers and the environment, but when this may also induce consumer boycotts and advocacy NGO campaigns?
2. Do trade flows and production linkages across borders shape the geographical patterns of international advocacy NGO campaigns and how do they interact?
In this project researchers at the University of Passau cooperate with Thierry Verdier and Pamina Koenig from the Paris School of Economics.
For more information, contact sebastian.krautheim@uni-passau.de