Suppliers in emerging economies Enablers and disablers of social sustainability implementation

Abstract

The social sustainability of suppliers in emerging economies is inadequate, resulting in the negligence for their workers human wellbeing and the potential for reputational damages for international buyers. Although the private and public governance have been researched to some extent, the influence of their institutional contexts remain understudied. This paper therefore investigates the influence that the private and public governance actors have and to what extent their underlying institutional contexts affect these outcomes. In this paper, we analyse these relationships on a sample of 391 suppliers whom are located across 12 emerging economies. Our findings suggest that the private governance actors have a positive relationship with the social sustainability implementation at the suppliers in emerging economies. Additionally, a moderation effect is also found. However, due to multicollinearity in the analysis, decreasing the statistical power, the result cannot be reliably interpreted.