Outward foreign direct investment from emerging economies: escaping home country regulative voids

Carmen Stoian and Alex Mohr

International Business Review, 2016, vol. 25, issue 5, 1124-1135

Abstract: The internationalisation of multinationals from emerging economies raises the question of whether mainstream theory can explain this phenomenon. We combine the explanations of outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) provided by the institution-based view and the investment development path (IDP) and suggest that the combined use of these explanations contributes to the reconciliation of the mainstream and emerging views of internationalisation. We argue that although OFDI is undertaken by firms to overcome the competitive disadvantages resulting from home country regulative voids, escapist investment is facilitated if these firms possess certain competitive advantages that help them overcome the liability of foreignness when expanding abroad. We thus expect the impact of regulative voids on OFDI to vary with the level of local firms’ ownership advantages. Our analysis of OFDI flows from 29 emerging economies over 17 years (1995–2011) provides support for the direct effects of two types of regulative voids and for the three suggested moderating effects of firms’ competitive advantages.

Keywords: Outward foreign direct investment; Emerging economies; Institutional voids; Mainstream theory; Emerging view of internationalisation; Institution-based view (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (65)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0969593116300233
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:iburev:v:25:y:2016:i:5:p:1124-1135

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/133/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... me/133/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.ibusrev.2016.02.004

Access Statistics for this article

International Business Review is currently edited by P. Ghauri

More articles in International Business Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().