Explaining the Internationalization of Emerging Economy Multinationals : The Relative Resource Specialization of Firm and Environment Mechanism

We study how the country of origin of a firm influences its internationalization, analyzing emerging economy multinational companies (EMNCs) as a laboratory for extending theory. EMNCs have been observed to vary from advanced economy MNCs (AMNCs), suggesting that the home context is the critical explanation. We propose “resource specialization” as the mechanism explaining differences and argue that firms in emerging economies develop a lower degree of resource specialization and wider sets of resources in response to underdevelopment at home. These more varied sets of resources lead EMNCs to have lower levels of internationalization and different patterns of foreign expansion than AMNCs