Reducing Social Distance: The Role of Globalization in Global Public Goods Provision

We suggest that globalization, a process that fosters greater interdependence and mutual awareness among actors around the world in their economic, political, social, and cultural interactions, will also decrease the social distance among them and thus increase individuals' propensities to cooperate with distal others. We demonstrate in a multi-country public goods experiment that among the four domains of individual participation in globalization, economic participation in globalization has the least effect in prompting cooperation. Conversely, the other three domains of globalization have strong effects on individual cooperation, and this is robust to different specifications of the econometric model.