Springboarding: a new geographical landscape for European foreign investment in Latin America

摘要

European multinational corporations are increasingly recognizing the value that their Spanish subsidiaries can offer in their Latin American operations. In essence, Spain can potentially function as a springboard into Latin America as part of multinational firms’ strategy. By elaborating on the role and functioning of what we have called a ‘springboard subsidiary’ and a ‘springboard strategy’, we seek to provide an appropriate theoretical framework to better understand this emerging phenomenon. We consider that springboarding is embedded in the economic geography literature that tries to answer the key issue of how global corporations manage their subsidiaries outside their home regions. It also draws on the recently developed multinational regionalization theory.