The literature on multinationality-performance relationship has been limited to multinational firms from developed economies, and previous studies generally disregard the effects of location and ownership structure. This paper seeks to explain this relationship in the emerging market context, highlighting the importance of location decisions and ownership structure. We use panel data that include 2258 multinationals from 25 emerging economies over a period of 2004-2013. We find a significant positive relationship between multinationality and performance. In particular, investment in developed countries rather than developing countries has a significant positive impact on firm performance. Private owned enterprise has a better performance in foreign markets than state owned enterprise. These results indicate that emerging markets firms can improve performance by investing abroad and the better location choice is developed countries. In addition, firms with different ownership structure should have different internationalisation strategies.
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