Entrepreneurship and the Internationalisation of Asian Firms

Entrepreneurs engaging in international business face business environments that are fundamentally different from their home countries. Despite decades of entrepreneurship research, we know little about these entrepreneurs and their strategic behaviour in establishing and managing transnational operations.

This book applies an institutional perspective on transnational entrepreneurship to empirical investigations of transnational corporations from Hong Kong and Singapore. Henry Wai-chung Yeung argues that significant variations in institutional structures of home countries explain variations in the entrepreneurial endowments of prospective transnational business networks. This is illustrated by empirical data from two in-depth studies of over 300 TNCs from Hong Kong and Singapore and over 120 of their foreign affiliates in Asia.

Entrepreneurship and the Internationalisation of Asian Firms is a timely contribution to theoretical and empirical studies in international business and will be widely read by those interested in international business, industrial economics, organisation studies, political economy, regional studies and economic geography.

Henry Wai-chung Yeung is Associate Professor of Economic Geography at the National University of Singapore, Singapore.

Also from Edward Elgar

The Globalization of Business Firms from Emerging Economies

Edited by Henry Wai-chung Yeung, National University of Singapore, Singapore

‘The strength of the book is that it provides diverse perspectives on developing-country TNCs from different disciplines, including business history, development studies, geography, political science, and regional studies. It also covers not only Asian TNCs, but others in Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, so that the reader has a shortcut to knowledge on developing-country TNCs from this collection. The book’s major contribution lies in providing fresh insights into the social and economic origins of international business and production.’

– Yong-Sook Lee, Economic Geography