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This study aims to advance a sub-national perspective within the OLI Paradigm by analyzing how and to what extent the Eclectic Paradigm can serve as a general model to capture region-specific aspects of the location determinants of FDI, encompassing institutional effects that extend beyond the quality of institutions.

The authors conducted a systematic literature review of 41 selected papers published between 1990 and 2019. Using inductive content analysis, they investigated the theoretical choices used to support analyses of the effects of institutional factors on MNEs' location decisions at the sub-national level.

It was found that, when changing from the national to the sub-national level of analysis, there is no need to change the main assumptions used in the literature, although a different perspective must be adopted. The Eclectic Paradigm permeates most of the studies revised and can serve as a general model to capture the sub-national perspective. It offers a foundation for new perspectives on the dynamics of institutional and political factors and their effects on location strategies and determinants at the sub-national level. Adopting the OLI Paradigm with a sub-national approach could widen the IB literature's prevailing focus on traditional economic factors and institutional quality.

The authors contribute to extant International Business literature Their paper enhances the literature on FDI location determinants by providing a more specific approach to development of a sub-national perspective within the OLI Paradigm, extending the institutional effects to capture more region-specific factors influencing the location of FDI. Study limitations are related to our analytical focus on the location dimension, excluding motives for FDI or firm-level location strategies. Rather than limiting analysis to quantitative studies, future research that includes qualitative studies and also covers the other dimensions of the OLI Paradigm could open additional new research avenues for advancing the sub-national perspective within the field of IB.

The authors’ main findings suggest that MNEs' location strategies should include a sub-national perspective, which means that firms need to assess different levels of the location and understand their interaction with nationwide constraints and limitations, as it may affect firms' ability to effectively conduct their value-adding activities. They also contribute elements that can support sub-national governments' actions and policies aiming to enhance locational advantages to attract and retain FDI.

This review specifically analyzes the location determinants of FDI at the sub-national level, in studies published in a broad set of journals, from a variety of fields, prioritizing articles that investigate sub-national institutional determinants. The authors derive implications for the International Business literature and propose that the sub-national dimension should be incorporated into the Eclectic paradigm in order to better understand the influence of institutional sub-national determinants.

Despite being a global public–private partnerships (PPPs) leader, India faces a vast PPP divide at a sub-national level, wherein a few states receive the majority of PPP projects, whereas other states face severe issues in attracting PPP investments. This necessitates the identification of factors that make some states attractive to PPP investors. The purpose of this study is to construct a “PPP readiness index” at the Indian state-level, which aims to assess the readiness of states for the diffusion of PPPs.

Using a quantitative method on secondary data, the study scores 17 Indian states on dimensions such as experience with PPPs, physical infrastructure, financial sector development, market conditions, institutional quality and political stability and fiscal constraints for each of the years during 2009–2018. Principal component analysis is used for assigning weights to the dimensions, thereby arriving at the composite index.

Results highlight that Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra offer the most favorable environment for PPPs to flourish. In contrast, Jharkhand and Bihar are laggards because they score the least and have limited PPP experience.

The index will assist the private sector in conducting a comparative analysis between state-specific PPP arrangements, thereby enabling them to make informed decisions prior to forging PPP arrangements. Further, the index will help the state governments in improving their PPP readiness by following the policies of the leading states.

Improvement in PPP readiness of the states will enable higher PPP investments in infrastructure, thereby reducing infrastructure deficits. This, in turn, will lead to economic growth, development and an improvement in the quality of life.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that comprehensively analyzes the PPP readiness at a sub-national level in India.

The COVID-19 pandemic educed extraordinary policy responses globally, including in India, to flatten the infection-growth curve. The trajectories of infections, recovery, and deaths vastly differed across Indian states. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether persistent investments by states in critical social sectors, such as health and education, explain their preparedness and hence better management of the pandemic.

This study uses secondary data on the number of infected, recovered and deceased due to COVID-19, along with data on population and income across 302 districts in 11 major states in India. Data on health and education indices are collected at the state-level. Linear regression models that also control for heteroskedasticity are applied.

This study finds that higher investments in health care and education reduce the propensity of the infection spread. Further, states with persistent investments in health care and education exhibit a higher rate of recovery. This study also finds that death rates are significantly lower in states with higher investments in education.

The findings support the conjecture that states that have consistently invested in social sectors benefited from the associated positive externalities during the crisis that helped them manage the pandemic better.

This study will help policymakers understand the underlying social forces critical to the success in the fight against pandemics. Apart from improving preparedness for future pandemics, the evidence provided in the paper may help give better direction and purpose to tax-financed public spending in states where social sector development has hitherto received low priority.

The paper offers the first systematic and comprehensive analysis of dynamics of economic growth slowdown for India at the sub-national level covering the period 1993–2013. In light of India’s regional diversity and variation in terms of gross regional domestic product (GRDP) per capita, the purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the growth dynamics at the sub-national level. The paper aims to answer two questions: first, are determinants of economic slowdown likely to differ across income groups? Second, what are the probabilities that the sub-national economies in India will experience a growth slowdown in the near future?

The paper undertakes a comprehensive analysis of growth slowdown for 106 Asian developing economies encompassing the national economies in ASEAN and the sub-national economies in Greater China, Indonesia and India. To be sure, the authors are not making any direct comparison to countries at different stages of economic development; rather, the comparison is between economies/sub-national economies that fall in the same income category. The authors construct income group-specific logistic model to identify the relevant determinants of growth slowdown and use Bayesian model averaging techniques as a robustness check. The authors also compute economy-specific predictive probabilities of growth slowdown over the period 2012–2017.

The empirical results show that a growth slowdown in various income groups tends to be associated with different sets of determinants, although broadly, across all income groups, the occurrence of growth slowdown is positively associated with higher GRDP per capita. The average predictive probability of growth slowdown for India’s sub-national economies is 0.43, indicating that, on average, India’s sub-national economies have a 43 per cent chance of experiencing growth slowdown in the 2012–2017 period. Overall, the prospects of the sub-national economies of India are less worrying than that of Greater Chinese economies but bleaker than the outlook for economies in ASEAN and Indonesia.

The research contributes to the understandings of growth dynamics, especially the issue of growth slowdown, in India. This paper differs from the existing literature on growth dynamics by being India centric and analysing the issue of growth slowdown at the sub-national level. Despite a steady increase in the level of GRDP per capita for the sub-national economies of India since 1993, significant disparities still exist across economies. Identifying determinants of growth slowdown and subsequently computing predictive probabilities serves as early warning signs for policy-makers and generates insights on how development policy can be shaped.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of real effective exchange rates (REER), both in terms of levels and volatility, on the export performance of India’s sub-national economies, given the recent slowdown in India’s exports.

India’s export distribution is highly asymmetric, with 90 percent of India’s exports concentrated in 11 sub-national economies. Exploiting this concentration, this paper constructs a panel data set using available data between 2002 and 2014 to understand the relationship between REER and exports from the top exporting cluster. Moreover, the paper constructs a sub-national competitiveness index to capture the supply capacity of the states.

The empirical findings of this paper reveal that a higher REER volatility deters exports and movements in REER do not matter as much as volatility. The most significant finding of the paper is that state competitiveness is the most crucial factor affecting trade. Therefore, policy makers at the state level must lay more emphasis on the supply side such as addressing logistical bottlenecks to help revive exports growth.

This study makes a departure from the plethora of extant aggregate-level studies by examining the relationship between REER and exports at the sub-national level for India. Considering the highly skewed distribution of India’s exports, the study provides important insights into the exporting patterns and determinants that are at play at the sub-national level.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the literature by introducing a novel index that measures ease of doing business (EDB) at the sub-national level. The authors provide a comprehensive assessment of both de jure and de facto business conditions in 21 sub-national economies of India, with the help of a holistic framework that encompasses indicators capturing Attractiveness to Investors, Business Friendliness and Competitive Policies (ABC), the three broad environments that constitute the EDB–ABC index.

The authors’ index EDB–ABC index is constructed using 81 indicators. The index values reported are standardized scores and the framework is applied to 21 Indian sub-national economies. The bottom-up approach takes into account the various operational issues that firms face at the ground level, with the emphasis being on de facto issues. A unique feature of the index is its emphasis on collecting extensive survey data at the sub-national level, given that several constraints that businesses face lie under the purview of the sub-national governments. It also combines publicly available macroeconomic data through formal statistical publications.

The findings suggest a positive association between the proposed EDB–ABC index and competitiveness of as well as investments into Indian sub-national economies. In terms of explanatory power, the authors find that indicators capturing attractiveness to investors and business friendliness which are representative of de facto implementation issues at the sub-national matter more than de jure competitive policies. It is also striking that the results are in stark contrast to the existing doing business studies highlighting the importance of the comprehensiveness of the index.

Easing the impediments to doing business is a pre-requisite to enhance both domestic as well as foreign investments. Existing indicators on doing business provide an incomplete picture about the prevailing business conditions as the basis for such rankings are de jure regulations and not de facto. The authors depart from this tradition by dealing with both de jure and de facto business conditions using a combination of primary and secondary data at the sub-national level in India.

The present paper makes an attempt to investigate the determinants that affect FDI inflows distribution among Indian states. Together with traditional determinants, the impact of institutional determinants on state-level FDI inflows distribution in India has been analysed.

The study uses panel data for a period of 20 years (2000–2019) for 17 groups of Indian states (29 states and 7 UTs). The empirical evidence is based on the panel data method and the findings support Dunning's OLI theory. As the data for some indicators for the institutional environment is not available at the state level, hence we used component analysis to arrive at the single component for the institutional factor. The study takes into account corruption, legal system, industrial disputes, man-days lost, labour availability, political risk, protection of IPR and agglomeration as potential macroeconomic and institutional determinants.

Results show that FDI inflows into Indian states is driven mainly by institutional environment. From our analysis, the author infers that the institutional variables such as legal system, IPR, corruption, political instability play an important role in determining the distribution of FDI inflows at the state level in India. Together with that GFCF and agglomeration are also important determinants of state-wise FDI inflows.

The major limitation of the study is that it doesn't include moderated impact of economic and institutional determinants of FDI inflows in Indian states, which can be an avenue for future research. Future research can also carried out taking district-level data to further examine the determinants at district level in India.

The contribution of the present paper is three-fold, first, the author constructs a measure of different institutional variables, after normalization of data for the period 2000–2019, and the author choose the highest explaining factor with the highest variance explained then we constructed the indices for select variable, which further has been used in the panel data analysis technique. The author has found that macroeconomic variables, as well as institutional variables, are significant to attract FDI at the state level in India. The paper shows that corruption, political risk, IPR and legal system are the major institutional determinants of FDI inflows in India at the state level. States with higher domestic investment attract more FDI inflows, moreover, agglomeration is a very important determinant as the investors are more confident in investing at the same location, the reason behind this may be that the investors want to avoid the registration procedure for new land, administrative formalities or they feel more secure at the same place and keen to invest at the same place again.

The objective of this study is threefold–first, to develop a Regional Competitiveness Index (RCI) for measuring competitiveness of sub-national regions for India; second, to test this index for its ability to explain regional growth, which validates usage and applicability of this index; and third, to further investigate if the competitiveness of states is in turn caused by economic growth, i.e. it is tested if there is a bidirectional causality between competitiveness and regional growth.

The data of indicators used in the index are from sources available freely in public domain. The competitiveness index is constructed using equal weightage supported by principal component analysis (PCA) technique. The causal relationship analysis is done using panel data of 10 years from 2008 to 2017 for 32 Indian states/union territories. The generalized method of moments (GMMs) is used for this dynamic regression estimation.

Based on RCI score, states have been ranked and through rank analysis, the authors observe the performance status of these sub-national regions and are able to categorize them as improving, no change or deteriorating in regional competitiveness. Using the GMM estimation, the association between RCI and economic growth is found to be significant at 10% level. This shows that regional competitiveness as captured through the RCI score is able to explain regional economic growth and economic disparity among the sub-national units. Further, that RCI score is found to Granger-cause growth, while growth does not lead to better RCI scores. This establishes the usefulness of RCI as an important policy variable to compare states and provide direction for sectoral reforms.

The limitations of the study include (1) broad assumption that these sub-national regions belong to a uniform macro-economic and technology environment, and (2) data constraints as it is a longitudinal study. The study implies that the composite index could capture differences in regional competitiveness explaining regional economic disparity and that competitiveness causes higher economic growth and not vice versa.

The RCI score can prove to be a useful indicator of economic performance of different states and can be used by national and state policymakers to compare and assess regional disparity among different states. The pillar-wise scores will be useful for in-depth study of weakness and strength of the sub-national territories.

Construction of an RCI for sub-national territories and analysis of panel data for longitudinal study of ten years is unique in the regional competitiveness literature.

This chapter examines whether Type 1 and Type 2 models of Multi-Level Governance (MLG) are suitable frameworks for analysing the operation of local enterprise partnerships (LEPs) as significant new partnerships at the sub-national level of governance in England. In doing so it bridges some gaps in knowledge, largely absent from MLG literature, by demonstrating how actors in economic development attempt to solve governance problems through co-operation rather than central steering and control.

The approach follows Stubbs (2005) who called for more political anthropological or ethnographic analyses, and the chapter draws on primary interview data and secondary documentary evidence from two LEPs in the north east of England.

Some advocates of MLG believe that governance should serve citizen needs but it is clear from the contents of this chapter that MLG has a number of weaknesses in this respect, as well as neglecting power relationships and misinterpretations of the concept of territory. The conclusion shows that LEPs as multi-agency partnerships need to be accountable and it is essential to adopt models that facilitate a clearer understanding of new spaces of interactions and multiple accountabilities. Using a stakeholder analysis fills some gaps in understanding of how partnerships work and who they are accountable to, as well as assessing how public services delivery models operate within a multi-level governance setting. All 39 LEPs have varying levels of trust between partners, as well as responding to multiple accountabilities. Neither Type I nor Type II MLG is sufficient on its own as an explanatory framework for analysing LEPs, but each does offer a useful entrée into this important field of enquiry.

The MLG concept is a helpful starting point, but its utility is governed by how it is augmented with other, more appropriate models of analysis. LEPs are a challenge to the dynamics of public accountability as they involve private actors at the heart of public service delivery; they are also interesting examples of persistent contestation between actors with different mind sets on outcomes and on legitimacy, accountability and representativeness. Stakeholder analysis allows a deeper appreciation of the interactions in space and multiple accountabilities of actors in LEPs.

LEPs in England are the preferred instrument for driving economic growth in regions and sub-regions. The findings help to explain more fully some of the intricate power and trust relationships in these partnerships. The chapter also examines multiple accountabilities and how actors connect within territories.

Critically the findings show an absence of real citizen engagement or expression of public opinions and feedback loops to citizens/publics/individuals/other organisations within such diffuse partnership arrangements. In an era of Localism it is essential for partnerships to be accountable to a wider group of societal stakeholders

The chapter takes a novel approach to analysing LEPs and builds on some existing work on MLG to obtain a deeper analysis of some of the complex inter-relationships and connections between actors on LEPs.

In this exploratory multiple case study, we aim to compare the internationalization of two state-owned enterprises (SOEs) owned by subnational governments with three owned by central governments in Latin America. This study provides a contextualized answer to the question: What are the differences in the internationalization of subnationally owned SOEs compared to central SOEs? This study finds that the speed and diversification of these two types of SOEs’ internationalization differ because they have a different expansion logic. Subnationally owned SOEs have a gradual and diversified expansion following market rules. Central government’s SOEs are specialized and take more drastic steps in their internationalization, which relates to non-market factors.

This study builds an exploratory qualitative comparative case analysis that uses multiple sources of data and information to develop a comprehensive understanding of SOEs through process tracing.

The study posits some assumptions that are confirmed in the case analysis. This study finds relevant differences between sub-national (SSOEs) and central authority (CSOEs’) strategies. SSOEs’ fewer resources and needs to increase income push them to follow a gradual market-driven internationalization and to diversify abroad. CSOEs non-gradual growth is justified by non-market factors (i.e. national politics). CSOEs do not diversify abroad due to the broader set of constituencies they have to face.

Given the exploratory comparative case study of this research, the findings are bounded by the particularities of the cases and their region (Latin America). This paper and its findings can be useful for theory building but it does not claim any generalization capacity.

This study adds complexity into the SOEs phenomenon by distinguishing between different types of SOEs. This paper contributes to the study of subnational phenomena and its effect in SOEs’ internationalization process, which is an understudied topic. To the authors’ best knowledge, this is among the first studies that explore subnational SOEs in Latin America.