The Asia‐Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum has only recently included investment liberalization on its agenda. A review of actions since the Bogor declaration of 1994 reveals that critical components of an investment liberalizing strategy are already being assembled within APEC. For...

As the nature of international trade and competition changes to reflect an increasingly borderless world, it is apparent that the organization of multinational firms and their relationships with all pertinent stakeholders are changing as well. This is occuring due to the predominant role of...

Purpose – Conventional studies of international competitiveness use country‐level data, but the aim of this paper is to extend this work by using firm level data of large Asian firms. Design/methodology/approach – The authors gathered the regional sales and assets data for large Asian...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a critical discussion of the scope and correct scale metrics used in the measurement of multinationality. Design/methodology/approach – There are two ways of measuring the degree of multinationality (sometimes called the international...

A paradox of international business is that the multinational enterprises (MNEs) – which are the agents of international business – largely operate within their home‐base markets in each part of the “triad” of North America, the E.U. and Japan. Here, empirical evidence is presented...

Of the forty banks included in the world’s largest 500 firms, none operate on a global basis. All but one are heavily dependent on their home region, with an average of 78.3 percent of their sales being intra‐regional. The other bank is European owned but has a majority of its sales in North...

A large and robust empirical literature demonstrates that there is a strong relationship between the performance of a multinational enterprise (MNE) and its degree of multinationality. We develop a new metric to capture the return on foreign assets (ROFA), which we use as an alternative metric...

The eclectic paradigm of Dunning (1980) (with its OLI and four motives for FDI framework) can be reconciled with the firm and country matrix of Rugman (1981). However, the fit is not perfect. The main reason for misalignment is that Dunning is focused upon outward FDI into host economies,...