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This paper aims to use the eclectic paradigm as a broad organizing framework to bring together two somewhat parallel international business (IB) literatures, one on the development effects of multinational enterprise activity and the other on the internationalization of emerging market multinationals (EMNEs). The author does so to better understand how outward foreign investment shapes economic development in firms’ home countries.

Considering that the characteristics of foreign investment by EMNEs likely differ from that of their developed economy counterparts and that such characteristics may have unique development consequences, the author revisits one of IB’s overarching theories to rethink how ownership, location and internalization advantages take shape and stimulate diverse development outcomes.

My narrative review and conceptual analysis indicate that the eclectic paradigm is a valuable framework that can be used to shed light on underexplored phenomena and thereby inform important policy debates. The analysis suggests that unique characteristics of EMNE investment simultaneously have positive and negative development consequences in their home countries.

The author sets out a research agenda that revolves around six propositions that separately relate one of these three distinct characteristics of EMNE investment to two development outcomes, namely, spillovers and direct effects on home-country employment. My propositions suggest that important policy dilemmas potentially apply, in that each of the three characteristics positively affects one of the aspects of development, but negatively the other.

My research agenda presents international business scholars with new opportunities to build on a history of policymaking impact, now geared toward resolving society’s grand challenge of underdevelopment.

China’s foreign aid efforts in Africa remain contentious. Chinese foreign aid tends to be different from “traditional” development assistance in that it frequently involves firms as the implementing agents of projects. Firms bring unique resources to public–private partnerships (PPPs) formed with government agencies, but their possible self-interested nature also gives rise to concerns over their development impact. Yet, on a larger scale, little is known about the characteristics of Chinese PPPs in foreign aid. Using project-level data available for 1,308 Chinese aid projects in 50 countries across Africa, the author characterizes the projects undertaken by firms and government agencies in a PPP and contrasts them to those executed by Chinese government agencies without firm involvement. This exploratory data analysis suggests that important differences apply, as Chinese PPPs tend to target different sustainable development goals (SDGs), work on the basis of distinct aid conditions, and implement projects that tend to be larger than those that are solely run by government agencies. Such observations raise important questions of an ethical, theoretical, and international nature, and warrant further research. The author develops a research agenda that aims at issues particularly important for business ethics scholars, organization theorists, and international business scholarship.

In this chapter, we aim to shed more light on the role of formal institutional distance in firms’ foreign entry mode choices by accounting for the direction of that distance. Specifically, we distinguish between foreign entries where the host country is institutionally less developed than the investing firm’s home country (negative institutional distance) and those where the host country’s institutions are comparatively more developed (positive institutional distance), and explore whether these different types of entries are implemented through different equity-based modes. We take an information economics perspective to develop hypotheses on the effects of positive and negative formal institutional distance on firms’ choices between greenfields and acquisitions, and between full and partial ownership of greenfield and acquired subsidiaries. We test our hypotheses on a sample of 1,070 foreign entries made by 796 emerging market multinationals originating from 14 countries. Controlling for the host country’s formal institutional quality and other factors, we find that negative institutional distance increases the likelihood that a foreign entry takes the form of a greenfield investment rather than an acquisition and that positive institutional distance decreases that likelihood. We also find that negative institutional distance increases the chances that firms choose greenfield joint ventures over wholly owned greenfields and full over partial acquisitions. Finally, we find that positive institutional distance does not affect firms’ ownership stake choices, neither for greenfields nor for acquisitions. Overall, these findings argue for a nuanced, contingency view of the role of formal institutional distance in foreign entry mode choices. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to use information economics to construct a holistic picture of firms’ equity-based entry mode choices, taking into account both establishment and ownership modes.