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Political risk should be seen as arising from renegotiation of implicit or explicit contract under which foreign investors enter a host country. Governments will legitimately enter into renegotiation to increase the share of rents earned by the society. Corrupt political leaders, however, will use their powers to extract rents from foreign investors for personal gains rather than for the good of the society. Political risk assessment, therefore, should assess the intentions of government as well as the strengths of political and social institutions that keep leaders under control. Firms should also understand that their own actions may contribute to creating political risk.

The digital economy, which heralds the start of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (IR4), is upon us. What can history teach international business scholars about how firms are likely to respond to this new form of technological change? Who are the likely winners or the likely losers? For 30 years, the author has lived through, studied, and written about the Third Industrial Revolution and other major environmental shocks, ranging from new entrants to academia to regional integration to outbreak of war, looking at the fundamental issues of how individuals, firms, communities, and countries respond to and are affected by life-changing events. In this chapter, the author tells seven brief stories about living through and studying “shocks and responses.” Perhaps, some of these stories may provide useful lessons to the scholars of IR4.

This paper examines the prospects of developing rational policy processes. The approach taken is to examine two components of policy processes. First, the paper analyses the way in which rationality has been applied to three different models, or modes of public administration: Weberian bureaucracy; market or rational actor political behaviour; and managerialism. The analysis suggests that “rational” approaches to public administration are inherently value‐laden, emphasising norms such as institutional integrity, representation or efficiency. Second, analysis is undertaken of policy implementation which is one phase of the policy process. The paper examines “top‐down”, “bottom‐up”, institutional and statutory‐coherence approaches to policy implementation. Contrasts amongst these competing models of policy implementation reinforce previous findings that there appears to be little prospect of achieving policy rationality because of the inability of the current approaches to policy analysis to enable reconciliation of fundamental normative assumptions underpinning the approaches. The current methods utilised by policy analysts do not appear to be able to provide either the tools or the structures required to achieve instrumental rationality in policy sciences.

Drawing on the international business and game theory literature, this study assesses foreign firm treatment in the early stages of regulatory enforcement.

Treating regulation intensity as an exposure variable, negative binomial regression models were applied to firm-level data from 32 emerging markets (n = 15,331) to identify the determinants of inspection interactions. Robustness checks also were performed via variable substitutions for several predictors and an alternative form of statistical testing (i.e. Tobit regression, since it arguably better addresses dependent variables with corner solution responses).

Controlling for multiple organizational, regulatory and national characteristics, the findings are consistent with a foreign privilege, manifesting in reduced vulnerability to multiple encounters with labor inspection officials. Moreover, inward FDI stock was negatively related to the general probability of repeat interactions regardless of locus of ownership, an effect that was not moderated by stage of development or the regulatory influence of host interest groups. This collectively suggests that foreign firms not only are favored in compliance monitoring but also work post-entry to influence agencies to generally benefit business.

More comprehensive assessments were precluded given the lack of information on reasons for contact, citations and fines, and inspectorate reactions to company responses. Second, enforcement-risk management was measured indirectly since investors' internal dealings and actions toward officials are unavailable in secondary sources.

These findings have important implications for social responsibility, suggesting CSR stakeholders need to track enforcement more closely and exert pressure where needed so rights are not sacrificed for economic development.

This study provides the most rigorous assessment to date of the role that firm, government and economic factors play in national inspection targeting. It also examined whether foreign owners pool and leverage their political influence to impact general inspection activity, a previously untested prospect.

The decision to build initiates the development process. After taking account of all the factors it represents a decision to embark on a built solution to satisfy the organisation’s strategic objectives. It is a decision that senior managers and members of the design team should be aware of, reflect on and consider why the decision to build was made in the first place. By understanding the history of the strategic decision the design team may be better able to respond to client requirements and opportunities by providing the most appropriate building. In practice, most participants in the design process are often divorced from the decision within the client organisation and may lack the necessary background information that informed, guided or forced the choice of a building solution. There is a dearth of well‐documented material and literature on this key decision in the development process. The literature is sparse and that which does exist often ignores or only includes as a secondary issue the decision to build. The attitude is often one where the decision is generally accepted as a given, not to be revisited or amended by later players. Presents some key findings from the research into the project inception and the decision to build process, with particular emphasis on the environmental factors that influence the process and the product.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate multinational enterprises’ (MNEs) performance and impact in contexts beyond their own internal objectives.

Based on an “eclectic” paradigm and the range of motivations, the framework is designed around three layers of evaluation: “efficiency” as static optimisation, “growth and development” as the dynamics of change on a purely economic view; political/economic sphere in terms of the outcomes of “distribution”, and “sovereignty” on the more purely political concern of how MNEs may undermine countries’ policy independence.

MNE and national economies have to use current sources of competitiveness efficiently while addressing the necessity to reinforce and refocus them through time. Within these broad agendas, significant interactions and outcomes reflect a range of contingencies conditioned by both MNE objectives and hosts’ competitive status.

The paper concerns economics and MNE role in globalisation. The paper defines a framework of four generic evaluative issues of MNE performance, which subsume a wider range of important but more niche concerns.

Much has been written about the behaviour of muntinational corporations (MNCs) and their relations with the nation state. However, there seems room for closer examination of the dynamics of such relations between developing economies and MNCs operating in sectors of strategic importance to the developing economy. The research reported here examines relations between international shipping companies and Bangladesh. The paper starts by reflecting on the growth and influence of the MNC, and the varied ways that such influence is manifest. This provides a backdrop against which to examine relations between shipping MNCs and Bangladesh. Following this review, the research design is sketched out, as a study of relations between Bangladesh as an emerging economy and shipping MNCs in pursuit of their business objectives. The study finds that regardless of political ambitions by the host economy, and regardless of the ethical proclamations of MNCs, it is the everyday challenges and opportunities of doing business that shapes ethical practices. Corporate officers, in dealing with local officials, take a pragmatic approach to achieving business objectives, while being fully aware that such pragmatism is often at odds with corporate moral intention. The study also finds that what counts as corporate socially responsible behaviour is politically defined.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how firms’ characteristics related to globalization affect their perception on corruption and actual experiences in bribery. It focuses on two indicators of globalization, namely, foreign ownership and export, and confines the scope to developing economies.

This analysis uses firm-level data with observation over 60,000 collected from 94 developing economies. The paper employs the probit model to examine how firm characteristics related to globalization affect corruption perception (CP) and incidence.

The empirical results reveal that for foreign-invested companies, there is a substantial discrepancy between the perceived corruption and the actual. Although they are involved in bribery as frequently as, or less frequently than local firms, they have greater CPs. Exporting firms are more frequently solicited for bribes, but the effect disappears when time spent for government contact is controlled for. Consequently, foreign investment partly contributes to the corruption control, but the export orientation of firms rather aggravates corruption due to regulative environments in developing economies.

This study provides policy implications that the corruption control through globalization requires streamlining of administration procedure related to foreign investment or trade and, thus, shortening time to deal with public officials. In addition, governments need to emphasize the importance of foreign investment and prevent unethical practices mediated by local partners.

The greatest novelty of this paper lies in using firm level data instead of country level unlike most of the literature. Moreover, the authors focus on firms only in developing economies. As well, unlike most studies using only perception indicators as the proxy of corruption, this paper considers both CPs and actual incidence, and compares each other.