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Chinese firms were operating within a closed economic environment before the “opening up” in the late 1970s, but it has only been in the late 1990s that China has recognized the importance of innovation. The Chinese government has attempted to rectify this liability by providing funding to assist Chinese firms in developing innovation capability by increasing R&D collaborations and employing external experts. The purpose of this paper is to study the innovation of Chinese firms by examining how internal and external resources interactively impact the innovation capability.

Panel data collected from Chinese manufacturers are used to test the hypothesized relationships.

The results have shown that the interplay between internal and external resources exhibits differential patterns of impact on innovation capability. The authors discover different moderating patterns of the two types of external resources: visiting experts are helpful in enhancing the effects of internal human resources, while R&D collaborations are useful in exploiting internal financial and physical resources, even when the main effect of financial resources on innovation capability is not significant.

The study contributes to the literature by providing empirical evidences on the roles of absorbed external resources and knowledge to catalyze internal resources in building up innovation capability in an emerging economy.

This study focuses on the relationship between foreign direct investment (FDI) and economic growth of the formal sector comprising all foreign and domestic registered enterprises engaged in production of goods and services.

This study uses a balanced longitudinal data set for the period from 2006 to 2014 from secondary sources in 63 provinces/cities of Vietnam. The generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation for a dynamic panel data model is applied.

The greater the share of FDI in capital resource, the more favorable the output growth in the whole formal sector. The FDI enterprises are more productive than domestic formal firms, and the output growth of FDI firms creates a positive spillover effect on the output growth of domestic firms.

The effect of FDI on economic growth is investigated at subnational level for the whole formal economic sector as well as the formal domestic firms. The domestic and foreign industrial agglomerations and the business environment are also examined.

This paper seeks to provide an understanding of the relationship between the management control policy of emerging economy (EE) firms and the knowledge transfer with the acquired firm, as well as the mechanism by which specific management control policy facilitates knowledge transfer with the acquired firms.

Employing an organizational learning theory, this paper examines the knowledge transfer from acquired firms to acquiring EE firms through multiple-case study of three EE firms.

Based on organizational learning theory and the results of case studies, this paper finds that the cooperation and willingness of employees in the acquired firm and language barriers are the main factors influencing the relationship between management control policy and the parent company’s knowledge transfer process.

This study sheds light on cross-border knowledge transfer to EE firms from an organizational learning perspective and broadens the understanding of post-acquisition knowledge transfer in an emerging market context.

This study suggests that the low-level management control facilitates knowledge transfer from acquired firms. This is especially true when the parent company from the EE has limited learning experience and faces substantial language barriers between itself and its acquired firm.

This paper extends existing research by exploring how low-level control of acquired firms in developed markets facilitates knowledge transfer of EE firms after cross-border acquisition. Future research can extend this line of research by examining the knowledge transfer mechanism of EE firms through qualitative and quantitative methods.

This study focuses on the linkages between foreign direct investment and the research and development (R&D) and innovation activity of domestic enterprises in Vietnam.

The Heckman selection model approach is applied to a panel dataset of nearly 7,000 Vietnamese firms for the 2011–2015 study period to investigate the impact of foreign presence on the R&D of local firms through horizontal and vertical linkages. Probit model estimation is employed to examine how foreign investment influences the innovation activity of local companies.

While there are a small number of firms carrying out R&D activities in Vietnam, foreign or joint domestic–foreign venture firms are less inclined than domestic firms to undertake R&D. Domestic factors that include capital, labor quality, location and export status of firm have a significant effect on the decision of domestic firms to participate in R&D activity. Only forward linkages and the gross firm output are found to have an impact on the R&D intensity of domestic enterprises, while other factors appear to have no significant influence on how much firms spend on R&D activities.

In order to promote the R&D activity of domestic firms, policy should focus on (1) the backward linkages between local firms in downstream sectors with their foreign suppliers in upstream sectors, and (2) the internal factors such as labor, capital or location that affect the decisions made by domestic firms.

Given that foreign investment may affect R&D and innovation activity of local firms in host countries, the impact is relatively unexplored for many emerging economies and not so in the case of Vietnam. The availability of a unique survey on Vietnamese firm technology and competitiveness provides the opportunity to address this gap in the literature.

One of the more important and interesting phenomena in international business in recent times is the upgrading and catchup of firms from emerging economies. How do these firms upgrade and catchup? This paper reviews and synthesizes the literature on upgrading and catchup by emerging economy firms and develops a model and testable propositions to advance research on the topic.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new theoretical framework called the “extended dual economy model”. Based on the seminal work of Lewis (2014), the author uses it to explain the sectoral specialisation of home countries and their firms and MNEs.

The paper is multi-disciplinary and entirely conceptual, with cool ideas but very few numbers and equations.

Emerging economies exhibit a “duality” in their economic structure that reflects itself in two largely different sets of location (L) characteristics. They are simultaneously home to both “traditional” sectors, which are resource and labour intensive, as well as “modern” sectors, which are knowledge and capital intensive, each of which can be analysed as having two sub-economies. These different sets of location advantages shape the firm-specific advantages of EMNEs and their FDI.

This analysis helps to underline what shapes the ability of home countries to “emerge”, and the ability of their firms to grow and their MNEs to become internationally competitive. Few EMNEs can thrive in international markets without concurrent growth in their domestic markets. Maintaining the appropriate location assets to optimally support both types of sectors is costly. Each type of sub-economy requires different kinds of support sectors, infrastructure and policies, with little overlap. Weaknesses in its home country L advantages hinder the long-term competitiveness of their EMNEs.

Few EMNEs can thrive in international markets without concurrent growth in their domestic markets. Weaknesses in its home country L advantages hinder the long-term competitiveness of their EMNEs.

The extension of the Lewisian dual economy model allows a number of interesting new insights because it allows us to consider firms, non-firms, informality and the bottlenecks associated with promoting knowledge-intensive sectors in a globalised world. It emphasises structural change, and the need to manage pathways and effectively channel growth.

This study examines how foreign R&D investment may explain interfirm variations in productivity performance of home country firms in terms of spillovers. Many have studied spillovers from MNCs to host country’s firms, but there is still scarce evidence on spillovers from outward FDI to the home country. This study analyzes spillovers from foreign R&D investment and hypothesizes that the benefit of outward R&D spillovers occurs only when knowledge accumulated in foreign R&D centers is effectively transferred to MNCs’ parent companies at home. This benefit depends on the mandate of foreign R&D units, their embeddedness in the host economy, and their entry mode. Using detailed firm-level data for Switzerland, our findings seem to support our arguments.

This paper aims to conduct a systematic meta-analysis on emerging economies to summarize these effects and throw light on the strength and heterogeneity of these conditionalities.

This paper proposes a new methodological framework that allows country- and firm-level effects to be combined. The authors hand collected information from 175 studies and around 1,100 estimates in Eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa from 1940 to 2008.

The two main findings indicate that “macro” effects are much larger than enterprise-level ones, by a factor of at least six and the benefits from foreign direct investment (FDI) into emerging economies are substantially less “conditional” than commonly thought.

The empirical literature has not reached a conclusion as to whether FDI yields spillovers when the host economies are emerging. Instead, the results are often viewed as conditional. For macro studies, this means that the existence and scale of spillover effects are contingent on the levels of institutional, financial or human capital development attained by the host economies. For enterprise-level studies, conditionality relates to the type of inter-firm linkages, namely, forwards, backwards or horizontal.

The paper examines the impact of export activity on productivity and how this effect is moderated by R&D investment and foreign ownership.

A time-lag effect is taken into account when examining the proposed model. Data are collected from the Annual Industrial Survey of the National Bureau of Statistics of China. A dataset containing 117,340 firms across the sample period (2001–2007) are used to test the hypotheses.

The results indicate that while R&D investment plays a significant role in strengthening the positive effect of export activity on a firm's productivity, foreign ownership surprisingly has a negative moderating role.

Scholarly interest in the links between export activity and productivity is on the rise. However, the bulk of research has been focused on understanding the effects of export activity on productivity at the country or industry level. Little has been done at the firm level. Another gap in the literature is that the mechanism through which the impact of export activity can be leveraged to enhance the firm's productivity has been largely ignored. To address these issues, the study adopts the learning-by-exporting theory to examine the relationship between export and productivity at the firm-level and how R&D investment and foreign ownership may explain how learning can be leveraged to enhance the firm's productivity. Finally, these relationships are examined in the context of firms from an emerging market, China, which is especially relevant for the learning-by-exporting argument used in this study.

This paper analyzes the available literature on export spillovers from foreign direct investment (FDI) and their effects on domestic firms’ export activities. The purpose of this paper is to advance our knowledge of whether export spillovers from FDI exist, and if so if they differ according to the institutional context of the targeted markets (developed vs emerging markets).

Drawing from the pioneering work of Aitken et al. (1997), the authors develop a meta-analysis using a selection of 73 studies for the period 1997–2018, including a wide range of developed and emerging markets.

The meta-analysis confirms a high probability of finding positive effects when studying the different types of spillovers. The authors also show that the type of export spillover depends on the institutional context. Spillovers drive a complementary effect which generates more direct commercial links between domestic firms and foreign multinationals for advanced economies, whereas for emerging markets the nature of the spillover generates a competition/imitation effect that pressures domestic firms to be better inserted into foreign markets. In emerging markets, local governments play a fundamental role in accompanying the local industry, not only with investments in infrastructure and training of human capital but also in the configuration of an institutional environment that favors this type of indirect linkages. In developed countries, two business strategies are particularly important as catalytic axes of competitive upgrading at the international level: cooperation agreements between domestic and foreign firms and integration. These processes of concentration are necessary to compete globally, and therefore, governments should promote this type of strategies.

The study offers an original classification of the different types of spillovers based on the different channels through which MNE help local firms to improve their export performance and shows which specific spillover is associated with the different level of country development. These results have important implications in terms of theory development and managerial and policy implications.