State Owned Multinationals

Multinational enterprises must contend with increasingly challenging conditions in the international business environment. This Handbook explores how classic principles of international competitive strategy are transformed in today's markets and provides suggestions on how firms can develop effective strategies to respond to these transformations.

This book provides a deep understanding of state-owned multinationals (SOMNCs) and their role in global business. SOMNCs have emerged as a force to contend with in global competition, and their study connects several fields such as economics, political economy, international business and global strategy. This prestigious collection of articles presents insights into the interaction between government ownership and internationalization, and aims to provoke new research approaches and insights on the topic. The book includes some of the key contributions to our understanding of these firms and new commentaries explaining how to analyze them. This book is essential reading for academics and consultants looking to gain a clearer understanding of SOMNCs and how to research them.

State-owned enterprises make up roughly 10 percent of the world economy, yet they are woefully understudied. This handbook offers the first synthesis of the topic since the 1980s and offers a comprehensive reference for a generation. The authors provide a detailed explanation of the theory that underpins the expansion of state-owned enterprises in the 21st century. Each chapter delivers an overview of current knowledge, as well as identifying issues and relevant debates for future research. The authors explain how state-owned enterprises are used in both developed and developing countries and offer an insight into complex and fascinating organizations such as the German municipal conglomerates or the multinational companies owned by states. New modes of governance and regulation have been invented to make sure they act in the public interest. This handbook brings together a wealth of international scholars, offering multiple theoretical perspectives to help shape a brave new world. It will be of interest to teachers and students of Economics, Public Administration and Business, academics, established researchers and PhD students seeking rigorous literature reviews on specific aspects of SOEs, as well as practitioners and decision makers in international organizations.

This chapter introduces the content of the book State-owned multinationals: Governments in Global Business. The book provides a deep understanding of state-owned multinationals and their role in global business. State-owned multinationals have emerged as a force to contend with in global competition, and their study connects several fields such as economics, political economy, international business and global strategy. This prestigious collection of articles presents insights into the interaction between government ownership and internationalization, and aims to provoke new research approaches and insights on the topic. The book includes some of the key contributions to our understanding of these firms and provides new commentaries giving detailed explanations on how to analyze state-owned multinationals, with guidance for future studies. Essential reading for researchers and consultants, the book helps readers gain a deeper understanding of these firms and how to conduct research on them.

Examines the fundamental role played by international law in the regulation of State-owned entities from a human rights perspective.

Written as a result of a world-wide study of major multinational state-owned companies, this book examines the extent of the "state-owned multinational phenomenon". It identifies certain companies, analyzes their origins and describes how and where they operate abroad.

Prior to the COVID-19 shock, the key challenge facing policymakers in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia region was how to generate strong, sustainable, job-rich, inclusive growth. Post-COVID-19, this challenge has only grown given the additional reduction in fiscal space due to the crisis and the increased need to support the recovery. The sizable state-owned enterprise (SOE) footprint in the region, together with its cost to the government, call for revisiting the SOE sector to help open fiscal space and look for growth opportunities.

We explain how the analysis of state-owned multinational companies (SOMNCs) can help extend the literature in two ways. First, we cross-fertilize the international business (IB) and state-owned enterprise (SOE) literatures in their analysis of foreign investment behavior and introduce two arguments: the extraterritoriality argument, which helps explain how the multinational company (MNC) dimension of SOMNCs extends the state-owned enterprise (SOE) literature, and the non-business internationalization argument, which helps explain how the SOE dimension of SOMNCs can extend the IB literature. Second, we analyze how the study of SOMNCs can help develop arguments that extend five theories of firm behavior: the triple agency conflict argument in agency theory, the owner risk argument in transaction costs economics, the advantage and disadvantage of ownership argument in the resource-based view, the power escape argument in resource dependence theory, and the illegitimate ownership argument in neo-institutional theory.

What makes a country attractive to foreign investors? To what extent do conditions of governance and politics matter? This book provides the most systematic exploration to date of these crucial questions at the nexus of politics and economics. Using quantitative data and interviews with investment promotion agencies, investment location consultants, political risk insurers, and decision makers at multinational corporations, Nathan Jensen arrives at a surprising conclusion: Countries may be competing for international capital, but government fiscal policy--both taxation and spending--has little impact on multinationals' investment decisions. Although government policy has a limited ability to determine patterns of foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows, political institutions are central to explaining why some countries are more successful in attracting international capital. First, democratic institutions lower political risks for multinational corporations. Indeed, they lead to massive amounts of foreign direct investment. Second, politically federal institutions, in contrast to fiscally federal institutions, lower political risks for multinationals and allow host countries to attract higher levels of FDI inflows. Third, the International Monetary Fund, often cited as a catalyst for promoting foreign investment, actually deters multinationals from investment in countries under IMF programs. Even after controlling for the factors that lead countries to seek IMF support, IMF agreements are associated with much lower levels of FDI inflows.