Driving International Revenue Growth Through Social Sustainability: Insights for Corporate Social Responsibility

Firms' international revenues help diversify revenue sources and reduce reliance on home markets, yet remain hard to grow given complex regulations, cultural differences and fierce competition. Grounded in the resource-based view, we argue that social sustainability is a valuable, rare, inimitable and non-substitutable resource that promotes stakeholder trust, compliance and market access abroad. Existing ESG performance research has primarily linked aggregate ESG scores to domestic firm outcomes. We instead isolate the social pillar to examine its role in firms' international revenue growth. Using 2SLS fixed-effects analysis on longitudinal MSCI–Compustat panel data for US publicly traded firms (2011–2023), we find that social sustainability accelerates foreign revenue growth, though this effect is weakened by operational efficiency, debt ratio, high-tech status and marketing expenditures. The robustness check with a 2SLS random-effects model also validates the results. Managers should safeguard investments in social sustainability to sustain firms' international revenue growth.