Towards a more comprehensive assessment of FDI's societal impact

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Wiessner, Yannick T.; Giuliani, Elisa; Wijen, Frank; Doh, Jonathan
• 署名单位: Erasmus University Rotterdam - Excl Erasmus MC; Erasmus University Rotterdam; University of Pisa; University of Pisa; KU Leuven; Villanova University
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS STUDIES
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0047-2506
• DOI: 10.1057/s41267-023-00636-9
• 发表日期: 2024
• 页码: 50-70
• 关键词: FDI; Societal Impact; MNEs; sustainable development

摘要

Societal actors increasingly expect multinational enterprises (MNEs) to positively impact the host countries in which they operate. While these expectations have prompted IB scholars to engage more extensively with the societal impacts of foreign direct investment (FDI), our collective knowledge of these impacts is limited. Early IB literature investigated FDI's aggregate impact but generally confined the scope to economic effects. Contemporary, strategy-oriented IB scholarship broadened the scope of impact types to include social and ecological effects, yet mostly limited the scope of the impacted actors to MNEs themselves. We argue that IB research should more comprehensively assess FDI's impact by incorporating social and ecological effects in addition to economic ones, and by accounting for a broader set of stakeholders beyond MNEs. IB scholars should challenge the assumption that FDI's economic impacts spill over to positive societal outcomes, and that MNEs' interests parallel those of host countries. A more comprehensive assessment will require IB scholars to question win-win assumptions about the complementarity of corporate societal and financial performance, examine FDI's societal impact over longer time horizons, leverage innovative approaches from allied sciences, and consider interactions between different types of societal effects in order to appreciate their sometimes countervailing effects.