The Growth and Evolution of Multinational Enterprise: Patterns of Geographical and Industrial Diversification (New Horizons in International Business)

As leading enterprises increasingly recognize the need for global strategy in the face of an increasingly competitive business environment, they also need to assess an increasingly heterogeneous range of possible paths to growth. This book offers an empirical analysis of some of these possibilities. Drawing on a large database of multinational firms, it investigates a series of important issues within an internally consistent ideological framework. It tests the determinants of the internationalization of sales by analyzing overseas production ratio, parent export ratio, overseas sales ratio and sourcing ratio. In so doing, it assesses the level of commitment to overseas production based upon the parent firm's export performance.