To be honest, I just don't like the idea of giving merits on local boards. I am sorry if I sound like a bad guy but I would say that local boards feel the national pride and duty to help each-other to rank up and give merits to their compatriots.
I think the situation is following: People from poor countries help each-other to rank up to participate in signature campaigns with high payroll. That's probably why I see that person only gets merits from local boards while his/her posts in English language never get rewarded. This isn't fair and probably destroys the main idea of merit system on this forum.
Correct me if I am wrong, I have no problem with that but this is just what I see and notice.
If a post really deserves to be merited, I would merit it without thinking twice. I wouldn't even check whether it was a local or global post. But again, I do believe what you just said to be true. It may sound sad and unfair, but it's the current reality with local boards (not all, but yes). For example, I can bring up my local board. If you notice closely, you will see that users are sending merits to themselves only. The incoming and outgoing merits are all in the local thread. Some could say that the user doesn't know English, which is why all his merits are local. But NO!!! That's not true. These users do post on global boards, but they lack quality and information. As a result, they don't get any merit from global users. The sad thing is they don't even try to improve their post qualities. As they know, they already have a way to earn merits, rank up, and join sigs. And this will continue until people stop giving away merits to the locals. I'm not against sending merits on local, I do send my merits to the locals too. But not as much as I used to be because of this reason.