Market servicing by multinational manufacturing firms: Exporting versus foreign production

The foreign market servicing behaviour of multinational manufacturing firms evolves over time as a result of the firms' reaction to internal and external pressures. The interplay of immobile ‘location factors’ with internal ‘ownership factors’ under the control of individual enterprises exercises a powerful influence on the choice between exporting and foreign investment. Plant economies of scale encourage exporting, whilst firm level economies of scale, such as the internalization of the fruits of research, may predispose the firm towards foreign investment. Socio-political and cultural elements arising particularly from the nationality of ownership of the firm also influence market servicing strategy.     

Towards an understanding of international city break travel

This paper explores city break tourism and, in particular, the distinctive characteristics of this form of travel. The city break is examined and compared with other types of trips. The research follows a sequential mixed methods approach involving both a visitor survey and in‐depth interviews. The findings show the international city break trip to have a number of distinctive characteristics. These are summarised into five main areas (5 Ds) — duration, distance, date flexibility, discretionary nature and destination travel party. These distinguishing features provide a useful insight into one of the most important yet least examined travel segments in tourism research. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Place,space, and foreign direct investment into peripheral cities

Perspectives drawn from the economic geography literature are increasingly used to generate insights into locational issues in international business. In this paper, we seek to integrate these literatures further by investigating the locational determinants of foreign direct investment (FDI) into peripheral cities within an emerging economy. Peripheral cities in emerging economies are attracting a growing proportion of global FDI flows, but the international business literature lacks a framework for understanding subnational determinants of FDI, particularly into non-core locations. We draw on the core-periphery model to build and test theory on how spatial interdependencies between subnational locations impact on the distribution of FDI inflows into a large and heterogeneous country China. Our results show that whilst peripheral cities tend to have a negative effect on FDI, this effect is positively moderated by proximity to core cities. The results highlight the importance of considering interactions between place and space when investigating locational issues in international business.     

Housing privatization in Romania

Over the past three decades, Romanian housing rights changed from a strictly managed public stock to one governed by individual decision‐making. And while it is typical that widespread private ownership provides a basis for a well‐functioning housing market, in Romania this has not been the case. Indeed, rather than creating a market that spontaneously allocates resources efficiently, housing privatization in Romania has created exclusion rights, thus creating an Anti‐commons problem. This problem can have effects similar to those of the tragedy of the Commons in which those who share a common good overuse it. In the Anti‐commons, in contrast, if too many owners have the right to exclude others from use of a resource, the resource is underused. In both cases, the rights allocation wastes resources.     

Exports in the strategy of multinational enterprises

Using data from a sample of 329 multinational firms, this paper analyses the impact of increases in foreign production on exports from the parent firm. The relationship between internal exports and foreign production is positive at all feasible levels of foreign production, although the impact on extra-group exports may be negative. These effects may be swamped by changes in relative international competitiveness between firms of the same nationality and industry group. The importance of these findings for multinational firms is that anticipation of these effects can reduce costs of reallocation of resources for the parent, firm and the results illustrate the wide remaining scope for further internationalization even among the world's largest firms. The impact of foreign production on home country employment is likely to remain positive so long as the firm's international competiveness can be improved.     

Foreign direct investment by small and medium sized enterprises: The theoretical background

This paper is an attempt to give a theoretical background to research on foreign direct investment by small and medium sized enterprises. Section 2 examines alternative theoretical approaches to SMEs investing abroad. Section 3 outlines the special issues which arise from SME foreign ventures and ends with an attempted synthesis of the theoretical approaches. In Section 4, a brief discussion of the nature of foreign direct investment by SMEs takes place. The paper ends with a short conclusion.     

The structure of british industry's sales in foreign markets

The structure of British industry's foreign sales is analysed by its principal components: exports, sales arising from licenses issued abroad and the output from facilities financed by British foreign direct investment. Total foreign sales are analysed by industry and by foreign market and differences in structure on both these dimensions are considerable. The literature is analysed in order to determine a preliminary set of variables which explain the structure at this highly aggregated level. Examination of the data allows us to focus on the most important explanatory variables, which include exchange rates, government policies and supply and demand factors.     

The determinants of strike activity in foreign-owned plants: Inter-industry evidence from British Manufacturing Industry 1971–1973

A simple exit(quit)–voice (bargaining) model of strike activity is applied to a sample of foreign-owned plants in British manufacturing industry. Strike activity is found to depend on both structural and cost factors. Intra-enterprise trade appears to be a significant cost consideration for integrated firms. These findings have important implications for labour responses to the multinational enterprise and challenge the alleged bargaining disadvantage of labour.