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This paper shows that consumer preference heterogeneity affects whether multinational firms serve local markets via imports or local production. Firms are least likely to choose local production over imports for product varieties that have relatively inelastic demand because transport costs have a smaller impact on the firm’s local profits for these products. The results suggest that there is complementarity between centralized production, with local market access via imports, and strategies that maintain low price elasticities at the brand level, such as advertising and within-brand product proliferation. A partial equilibrium study of the laundry detergent industry in Western Europe illustrates how firms and consumers interact at different levels of transport costs and reveals the product varieties that are most and least likely to be manufactured locally when transport costs are high.

Among the prominent economic trends in recent decades is the exponential increase in flows of goods and capital driven by technological progress and falling of restrictions. A key driver of this phenomenon has been the cross-border production, foreign investment, and trade both final and intermediate goods by multinational corporations. Research has sought to understand how foreign direct investment (FDI) affects host economies. This paper reviews the main theories and empirical evidence of two streams of literature: the mechanisms by which multinational activity might create positive effects and externalities to countries and the role of complementary local conditions, also known as “absorptive capacities,” that allow a country to reap the benefits of FDI paying particular attention to the role of factor markets, reallocation effects, and the linkages generated between foreign and domestic firms. The survey focuses mainly on work related to developing countries.

It has been demonstrated by Rugman and his colleagues that a majority of the activities undertaken by the world's largest 500 MNEs, such as sales, assets, and employment, are regional in nature. This evidence has also been extended to trade and FDI patterns of OECD countries. Given the costs associated with doing business in foreign and distant markets, one may expect there to be a regional concentration in such activities. That is, the concentration of MNE activities in regional markets may be consistent with a transactions cost model. The objective of the analysis undertaken in this paper is to measure the extent to which the concentrations of OECD MNE activities can be explained by a formal transactions costs model (the gravity model in this case). These results are important for two main reasons. To the extent the concentrations are consistent with a formal model, then, first, this would provide further theoretical arguments in support of Rugman's hypotheses, and second, this would indicate that MNE managers have it right – that is, the activities of the corporations they manage are as global as they should be. On the other hand, if the activities are not fully explainable by atransactions cost model, the implications would be quite different. Theresults indicate that although some activities can be explained by a gravity model, many dimensions of OECD MNE activities, especially within the EU, are not explainable using a gravity model. That is, many of the activities of EU MNEs are more regionally concentrated than would be predicted by transactions costs.

Location-specific advantages (LSA) and the liability of foreignness (LOF) are key concepts in international business and management research. To combine these concepts in a systematic framework, I develop a two-by-two matrix focusing on the nature of International Business (IB) research using four key terms: firm, context, comparative and interactive. This framework serves as a heuristic device in describing three main challenges IB scholars face when advancing the role of LOF and LSAs. These challenges relate to our understanding of the nature of relative advantage, to the development of a dynamic (so-called non-ergodic) world view and to the inclusion of the relevant spatial heterogeneity.