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The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential regional preferences of the diaspora and explain how such preferences affect their decision when engaging in reverse Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). Since diasporas often act as conduits for trade and investment, the author is interested in whether these regional preferences affect their choice of destination for FDI.

The author developed and pre-tested a questionnaire that was administered in pen and paper as well as online. Totally, 158 professional, managers and entrepreneurs with Indian diasporic background in the USA and Canada participated in the study. Follow-up interviews were conducted with 25 participants.

Participants indicated that they did not favor their region of origin over the entire country. However, most of the participants only invested in their region of origin.

Interviews were based on the original survey questionnaire and did not further probe other issues. The current study should be treated as exploratory in nature and the results should be used as a springboard for future research.

It would seem that the region of origin was important in the decision to migrate and for reverse FDI, even though cognitively the participants did not recognize it to the same extent. This might point to a mediation effect, which should be investigated in future studies. This paper helps businesses and governments understand the extent to which sub-national regional ties explain the investment motivations of people investing back in their home countries.

Furthermore, the importance of regional ties in the decisions to both invest and migrate point to the importance of studying sub-national cultural and institutional issues rather than treating large multicultural countries such as India as a monolithic bloc.

The author used network ties theories to investigate and explain the investment behavior of Indian diaspora. While other disciplines (e.g. geography, sociology and economics) might have studied similar phenomena, the author looked and expanded the knowledge from a management perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to study the migration of the Indian diaspora to Canada and the USA and its role in fostering trade and investment between them using its transnational social networks.

This study was based on interviews with 25 Indian immigrants, 13 in Canada and 12 in the USA.

The social networks that immigrants had in both their country of residence (COR) and country of origin (COO) act as conduits of trade and investment between the two. The Indian diaspora further facilitates economic engagement between the COO and COR by running cross‐border businesses, introducing Indian products and brands in the COR, introducing the Indian culture and helping non‐Indians to invest in India. Within the COO, the diaspora's social networks often helped Indians in India connect with markets, suppliers and potential business partners in the COR.

The sample size was 25 people and was restricted to managers, executives and entrepreneurs of Indian origin, since it was assumed that these people are the most likely to drive trade and investment between the COO and COR.

For policy makers in COOs, the paper stresses the importance of maintaining social and economic ties to the diaspora, who can often bring important trade and investment related benefits to the COO. For CORs, the paper reveals the importance of utilizing the transnational networks that the diaspora possess, that can be beneficial for the COR companies in entering new markets. Leveraging both the human and social capital of the diaspora in a mutually beneficial way is one of the biggest challenges for policy makers in both the COO and the COR.

The paper shows that within the COR, the local Indian community provides social and moral, rather than financial support to newly arrived Indian immigrants.

The paper explains the linkage between diasporas, trade and migration by focusing on the reasons for diaspora immigration, the social networks that the diaspora has, and the diaspora activities in the COR. It contributes to the literature on social networks by pointing out the importance of the diaspora's transnational social networks in both the COR and COO in driving trade and investment between them. It also adds to the brain circulation literature through its finding that pull factors, rather than push factors, were responsible for the vast majority of Indian immigration to the USA and Canada, and that by making diaspora‐friendly policies, brain circulation will be made easier, and this can help both the COO and COR in the long run.

The literature has acknowledged the importance of diaspora studies because of the influx of funds into the local economy, including the tourism and hospitality sector. However, little empirical research appears to be known about the subject matter, principally within the developing country perspective. This study aims to respond to research calls by investigating the impact of diasporic cultural heritage, family heritage on travel preference of West African Indian migrant visitors to their homeland.

This research is guided by the theory of acculturation. A quantitative data were gathered from a sample of 312 diasporas, and the regression analysis was used to analyze the data.

The study finds that cultural heritage and family heritage have positive and significant impact on travel preference of migrant visitors to their homeland. Further analysis of the independent sample t-test reveals a significant difference between Indian Ghanaians and Ghanaian Indians in their thought of cultural heritage. However, no significant differences were found in the Indian Ghanaian and Ghanaian Indian’s family heritage and travel preference to their homeland.

This study is destination-specific of Indian migrant visitors. The application of the study’s outcome to other diaspora would demand a larger sample size for generalization to be made. The study offers compelling insights on cultural heritage, family heritage and travel preference to marketing a diaspora tourism site.

The study expands the application of the theory of acculturation within the diaspora literature and establishes that integration and separation strategies of the theory explain the positive interests of the migrant visitors’ traveling preference to their homeland.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a conceptual overview of potential diasporic influence in India by Indian diaspora and to outline a wide spectrum of policy interventions for better utilisation of diasporic resources, which are under-exploited.

This paper used a systematic review approach to analyze the vast empirical and theoretical literature, up to 2016, and to assess the different kinds of impacts of diaspora on the homeland. A list of top-tier journals in the field of international migration, diaspora and ethnic entrepreneurship was compiled. From there, each and every paper was identified, examined, coded and classified into high-level themes. These were then reviewed, analyzed and interpreted.

Indian diasporic affair has undergone numerous changes since India’s independence. This study presents a conceptual framework on the role of migration and diaspora in the country of origin with a special focus on India and point out the possible directions for future studies.

The systematic review approach has a qualitative nature, in which the relevant literature was interpreted based on the authors’ domain knowledge and expertise.

Academicians and policy practitioners can gain a comprehensive understanding of the dynamic relationships among the key influential factors in migration, diaspora and its developmental role in homeland, as presented in the conceptual framework in the study. Accordingly, policymakers will be able to develop effective strategies to leverage the positive impacts of diasporic role in India and the other South-Asian developing countries.

This systematic review synthesizes the findings reported in most recent publications and government reports and develops an integrated conceptual framework, anchoring on possible positive impacts of diaspora in homeland. This framework provides a visual diagram to practitioners for a better understanding of the relevant literature and assists researchers and policymakers in developing a new strategy for future diasporic affairs.

This paper aims to examine the Indian migrants' role in attracting outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) from India to their respective host countries. Diasporas play a crucial role in augmenting trade, foreign direct investment and prosperity of a country. They facilitate acquisition and exchange of technical knowhow, market information and physical capital, and are therefore considered as social capital.

This paper employs mixed effect model using data for the period 1999-2008.

This paper finds that the presence of Indian diaspora has a substantial positive effect on the volume of Indian overseas investments in the developed countries. This is particularly the case with Indian OFDI to Asia Pacific, whereas those to Europe appear to be affected by the Indian migrant community only in the presence of bilateral investment treaties (BITs). The author findings highlight the role of Indian diaspora in promoting trade and investment links between India and other Asia Pacific countries.

This is the first empirical analysis of the role of Indian overseas community in attracting Indian OFDI.

Diasporas can play a vital role in enhancing a country's international competitiveness. They can act as catalysts to enhance human capital development in their country of origin (COO), use their transnational social networks in both the COO and country of residence (COR) as conduits for trade and investment, introduce COO culture and products in the COR, enhance the COO's soft power and use their social networks to favourably affect the COO effect. In this paper, we examine the vital roles that modern diasporas play, as well as the issues that have led to their increasing importance. These issues are illustrated by looking at the experiences of two of the largest modern diasporas, the Chinese and Indian diasporas. The paper concludes by examining some of the emerging issues for diasporas in the fast changing current global environment, and discusses some of their implications for the diasporas themselves, their COOs and their CORs.

The racial diversity of the Caribbean stemmed directly from the historical processes of colonialism, imperialism, slavery, and indentureship. Since the early 17th century, slaves have been imported from Africa to work in the Caribbean. In the British West Indies, slavery was abolished in 1834 but these African slaves worked on the sugar estates until the apprenticeship was abolished on August 1, 1838. Even before 1838, planters frequently complained of labor shortages and appealed to Britain for the approval of imported labor. Thus, there were attempts by the planters in colonies, such as Trinidad, to introduce Chinese labor to the plantations. As early as 1806, there was the importation of 192 Chinese from Macao and Penang into Trinidad. However, this experiment soon failed. In 1834 and 1839, laborers from Portugal were imported into Trinidad. This soon ended as Portuguese workers could not withstand the rigorous conditions of the contract labor system.

Using human capital theory and resource-based view (RBV), the authors argue that individuals and societies derive economic benefits from investments in people (Becker, 1992; Sweetland, 1996), thus effective management of talent is critical for economic development (Lepak and Snell, 2002; Khilji, 2012a). Next, the authors review governmental policies in three of the world's most populous countries, Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, in order to highlight their national talent development efforts. The authors discuss how each country is meeting the challenge of making the talent they own, as well as buying diaspora talent in order to strengthen their local capabilities. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors adopted a comparative analysis approach in order to frame our arguments and discussion.

The paper finds that Bangladesh, India and Pakistan have implemented a wide range of initiatives, from skill development programs to citizenship policies for its diaspora, in order to upgrade their local capabilities. In addition, these countries are simultaneously using inclusive, exclusive, and subject dimensions (Gallardo-Gallardo et al., 2013) in developing their national talent. The paper highlights prevalence of the paradox of development and retention particularly in Bangladesh and Pakistan, where youth is also being trained to emigrate.

Global talent management (GTM) has become an increasingly important policy initiative, in view of a global generational divide that will require youth-rich emerging economies and aging developed countries to implement policies that help them meet global talent needs.

This commentary advances a macro GTM view, and argues in favor of promoting a policy perspective to better connect policy, research and practice that may lead to maximizing human potential globally and addressing global talent shortages.

The aim of this study is to identify the distinctive features of the diaspora phenomenon through the aggregation and systematization of the business and management literature and propose a framework to apply in the future studies.

The two-step research was based on a combination of bibliometric analysis and a manual in-depth study of academic articles. Overall, 421 academic papers in management and business journals until 2019 year were analyzed.

The authors provide a new holistic insight on the role of national diasporas for business outcomes via the analysis and systematization of the extant diaspora research. They revealed four definition approaches and five main clusters in the diaspora literature that have three main directions of research as international marketing with the tourism management focus, the IB research and diaspora entrepreneurship studies. The authors cover these main research streams and their contribution to the development of a topic.

The proposed framework including definition approaches and suggestions on the further research can serve as a foundation for future studies to investigate the diaspora phenomenon. The findings also are of practical value for firms whose attention is paid to the effective management.

To bring more clarity to the existing and future development of diaspora research, this paper improves the structuring of the overall diaspora literature through clarification of the existing definitions of diaspora, provision of the criteria qualifying someone to be identified as a member of a diaspora, as well as an analysis and systematization of existing diaspora research streams and suggestions for future research directions.