Belt and Road Initiative, globalization and institutional changes: implications for firms in Asia

The establishment mode of Chinese MNEs abroad and the Belt and Road Initiative: insights from a strategy tripod perspective

Purpose

Emerging-market multinational enterprises (MNEs) have pushed institutional factors to the cutting-edge of international business research. As for Chinese MNEs, the importance of institutions has been strengthened since the Chinese government launched the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which seeks to promote a comprehensive platform for cooperation among countries. This study aims to investigate the role played by the BRI as an institutional factor moderating the influence of other institution-, industry- and firm-specific factors on establishment mode choice by Chinese MNEs.

Design/methodology/approach

Drawing on the strategy tripod, a perspective claiming that a firm's strategies are the result of internal, industrial and institutional conditions, this study develops a number of hypotheses that are tested with data on 1,076 outward foreign direct investments (OFDIs) of Chinese MNEs between 2013 and 2021.

Findings

The results show that the BRI moderates the influence of both the firm's prior international acquisition experience and Chinese government's OFDI restrictions on the establishment by means of an acquisition. They also report that this moderating effect does not apply for acquisition experience in the host country nor institutional distance.

Originality/value

This study contributes to reinforce the importance of institutions as the third leg of a strategy tripod when explaining international behavior of Chinese MNEs. It also suggests that the BRI is a diplomatic tool that may act as a substitute for the firm's resources and may mitigate the negative influence of other external factors.

Exploring the longitudinal effects of emotional intelligence and cultural intelligence on knowledge management processes

Managing knowledge has become a new reality for multinational corporations (MNCs). Previous studies in the management field have closely examined personality traits as stable dispositional constructs over time, but they oversighted the possibilities that seemingly stable traits are likely to have different effects on outcomes in varying time waves. Combining horizontal and longitudinal surveys, this study collected two-wave datasets of 216 employees from MNCs, and built Fixed, Continuous and Interacting Models to investigate the effects of individual emotional intelligence (EI) and cultural intelligence (CI) as key traits on the processes of organizational knowledge management (KM) over time. This study discovered the fixed, continuous and interacting roles of EI and CI in KM processes at different times, and it also concluded that the traditional assumption of conceptualizing the effects of dispositional variables as fixed should be re-examined. The findings provided empirical and statistical evidence for future research as well as management suggestions for MNCs implementing KM practices.

The Belt and Road Initiative and international business policy: A kaleidoscopic perspective

In this editorial, we take stock of the nature and scope of China’s global development strategy named the “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI), and how it influences international business (IB) policy. We build on the state of the current IB literature on the BRI and the findings of the Special Issue articles to suggest the need for complex integrative thinking on the initiative. We show that the BRI – like a kaleidoscope – elicits vastly different patterns of opportunities and challenges as we turn the perspective from policymakers in China, to governments in BRI host countries, and to officials in third countries. We illustrate how the application of integrative thinking to these perspectives allows for the identification when BRI projects generate tensions between countries and how this influences their IB policies. We further discuss under which circumstances BRI projects may benefit all sides and which IB policies can help promote these types of projects. We conclude with a discussion of future research directions.

Speed of China’s OFDIs to the Belt and Road Initiative destinations: State equity, industry competition, and the moderating effects of the policy

Organizational timely investments determine the success of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), yet few studies have explored the antecedents of those speed decisions. Based on a dataset of Chinese-listed firms over 11 years, we address this research paucity by incorporating the push and pull antecedents of OFDIs. The study revealed that industry competition significantly facilitates organizational BRI investment speed after the launch of the initiative, but such facilitative effects become weaker for firms located in the key BRI-participating provinces. Intriguingly, firms with greater state equity are slow after the launch of the BRI, and their slow gestures become more severe in those key provinces. The additional tests implicated that this result occurs because of inadequate positioning of those inland provinces. Overall, the study clarified the nature of the BRI by exploring the speed dimension. The findings also challenged the conventional wisdom of treating firms with greater state equity as obedient extensions of the government by unmasking their conservative attitudes toward the BRI, highlighting some fallacies of contemporary BRI policy. Third, the temporal and geographic aspects should be applied simultaneously to examine the policy effects of the BRI.