Testing the Drivers of Corporate Environmentalism in Vietnam

Edmund Malesky, director of the Duke Center for International Development, co-authored the article, “Testing the Drivers of Corporate Environmentalism in Vietnam," which is published in Studies in Comparative International Development.

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In the article, Malesky and co-author Quynh Nguyen, University of Bern, examine the motivating factors behind private firms’ willingness to invest in green technologies and environmentally friendly operations.

The authors used a survey experiment with more than 10,000 firms in Vietnam to test which type of stakeholder pressure has the strongest impact on domestic and foreign business leaders’ intention to invest in green operations.

"We find that the effectiveness of stakeholder pressure is conditioned by the firms’ target markets," the authors wrote in the article's abstract. "Foreign investors are more susceptible than domestic firms to intensive regulatory pressure. Accounting for export orientation, however, we find that the most amenable policy targets for regulatory pressure are foreign firms aiming to sell in the Vietnamese domestic market."

Read the paper.