Journal of International Business Policy

The importance of managing intellectual property (IP) on a global basis has been widely acknowledged by scholars and practitioners alike. However, we still have limited understanding of how multinational enterprises (MNEs) choose – among all the countries they do business in – where to file for IP protection and where they exercise their IP rights through litigation. In this study, we examine MNEs’ strategic choices of patenting and litigation locations through the lens of global competition. We argue that, while IP protection is local, relying on local policies and institutions, firms engaging in litigation are global. Thus, they prefer to litigate in the few countries with substantial track records to send strong signals to competitors elsewhere. This is particularly true for highly concentrated industries, where the same competitors face off in various countries, and for firms with radical innovations, which require expertise for a convincing verdict. We find supportive evidence of country, industry, and firm effects from extensive interviews with industry insiders and a comprehensive dataset documenting all the IP-related activities of Fortune Global 500 companies from 2007 to 2014. We discuss how the strategic choices made by global firms, in turn, influence the effectiveness of local policies and IP harmonization efforts across countries.

This paper considers migrants on a continuum in terms of voluntariness of departure and intended timeframe in the new location. The corresponding 2 × 2 framework offers a theory-driven typology with which to consider four groups: exiles, sojourners, immigrants, and refugees. We apply the framework to the topic of migrant entrepreneurship, demonstrating the need for separate consideration of refugee and immigrant entrepreneurs. We propose ways in which types of capital differ between the two and discuss how differences affect entrepreneurial endeavors. The framework extends scholarship on migrant entrepreneurship, while providing a nomological net for improved theorizing for a range of migrant situations.

Đại dịch COVID-19 đã gây ra tình trạng thiếu hụt nghiêm trọng về các vật tư y tế cần thiết để điều trị virus do sự gia tăng nhu cầu mạnh mẽ khi căn bệnh lan rộng ra toàn cầu trong nửa đầu năm 2020. Trước khi xảy ra khủng hoảng, có sự phụ thuộc lẫn nhau giữa thương mại và sản xuất các vật tư y tế, với các quốc gia công nghiệp phát triển như Hoa Kỳ và Đức chuyên ngành về lĩnh vực thiết bị y tế công nghệ cao tương đối, trong khi các trung tâm sản xuất chi phí thấp như Trung Quốc và Malaysia là những nhà sản xuất hàng đầu về các sản phẩm thiết bị bảo hộ cá nhân (PPE) ít công nghệ phức tạp hơn như khẩu trang, găng tay phẫu thuật, và áo choàng y tế. Sau khi bùng phát COVID-19, tình trạng thiếu hụt PPE đã xuất hiện trên toàn cầu khi nhiều quốc gia bị ảnh hưởng áp dụng các biện pháp kiểm soát xuất khẩu và tìm kiếm cách tăng cường sản xuất trong nước. Một nghiên cứu tình huống về chuỗi giá trị khẩu trang ở Hoa Kỳ cho thấy sự không đồng bộ giữa các ưu tiên của các quan chức chính phủ liên bang Hoa Kỳ và các chiến lược của các nhà sản xuất đa quốc gia hàng đầu của Hoa Kỳ về khẩu trang, điều này dẫn đến những trì hoãn chính sách tốn kém một cách đặc biệt về mặt kết quả sức khỏe. Tóm lại, sự thiếu hụt khẩu trang N95 của Hoa Kỳ trong đại dịch COVID-19 chủ yếu là một thất bại về chính sách hơn là một thất bại của thị trường. Khung chuỗi giá trị toàn cầu làm nổi bật các lựa chọn chiến lược có thể dẫn đến các chuỗi cung ứng bền vững hơn và mô hình cung ứng đa dạng hơn.

Improving the quality of entrepreneurial activities has become a priority in policy debates globally. However, despite significant investment in resources, the outcome is disappointing, as the relative rate of opportunity compared to necessity entrepreneurship has not improved significantly across nations. Grounded in an institutional theory approach, we examine whether culture is the missing link in our understanding of the conditions that explain cross-national variance in this rate. Our analyses, based on a 10-year panel dataset comprising 58 nations, support our arguments, in that we find that the cultural dimensions of autonomy–embeddedness, egalitarianism–hierarchy, and mastery–harmony moderate the extent to which regulatory burden and cognitive infrastructure influence the relative rate of opportunity compared to necessity entrepreneurship across nations. Our findings advance the contextualized approach in entrepreneurship and illustrate that understanding the integrative effects of formal institutional environment and informal cultural framework is critical for improving the quality of entrepreneurial activities. We offer implications that will be useful for policymakers to consider as they advance programs to improve the economic growth of nations.

How foreign firms doing business in Russia responded to the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has received extensive media scrutiny. Publication lags in official and private databases on international corporate activity, traditionally used to investigate cross-national commercial ties, preclude short-term assessments of foreign firms’ responses. However, as geopolitical events unfold quickly, such assessments can offer valuable insights. In this paper, we advocate for and implement a replicable, near-time methodology that is executed at arms-length to track foreign corporate responses to geopolitical events which can inform both academic debate and policy deliberation. We apply it to the ongoing Russia–Ukraine conflict, estimating Western corporate divestment rates from Russia during the first 9 months of the conflict. Our findings, confirmed by extensive robustness checks, result in divestment rates in the range of 5–13%. This range is interpreted in light of the prevailing sanctions regime as well as the divestment rate witnessed after Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014. We also discuss the competing, often policy-induced, incentives facing international business during a time of growing geopolitical rivalry and draw implications for the design of sanctions regimes. Avenues for future research are also outlined.

Multinational enterprises operating global value chains are being increasingly pressured to source from suppliers that adopt green private standards. Likewise, public policymakers are also pressured to reduce national pollution levels to contribute to sustainable development initiatives. In this context, while there is extensive debate on how domestic, country-specific environmental regulations interact with private standards (adopted by firms) in reducing national pollution levels, less is known about the role of international trade policies, which have recently embraced an array of sustainability issues. Our paper seeks to extend our understanding of the extent to which ISO environmental certifications affect a country’s level of emissions of greenhouse gases and air pollutants, and whether the European Union’s environmental protection (EP) standards – as mediated through trade agreements – condition this response. Prior research provides mixed evidence on the impact of the adoption of ISO-14001 on pollution reduction. Based on prior literature and using institutional theory and environmental stewardship perspectives, we expect that membership of trade agreements with EP provisions would complement the effect of ISO-14001 uptakes in reducing national pollution levels. Our arguments and results emphasize the complexity between private and public regulations on pollution reduction.

While Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) was expected to hike up prices of patented medicines, there was no consensus on its likely final impact on access, because the agreement housed instruments to address this challenge. For instance, compulsory licensing, through the facilitation of price reductions, was considered to be an important countermeasure. However, little is known about the extent to which compulsory licensing has actually been effective in reducing prices of much-needed patented drugs. To fill this gap, this paper undertakes a systematic-review of the existing evidence on the impact of compulsory licensing on drug prices. Retrieval and analysis of 51 observations of pre- and post-compulsory licensing prices indicate that a compulsory licensing event is likely to reduce the price of a patented drug, albeit with some caveats. Moreover, compulsory licensing procurement from the international market is likely to be more effective in reducing drug prices than contracts to local companies. These findings are reconfirmed in the race to improve access to Remdesivir for hospitalized COVID-19 patients. Clearly, the future incidence and impact of compulsory licensing will depend on further possible procedural refinements to ease its implementation, the development of technological and manufacturing capabilities in developing countries, and the importance of biologics among life-saving drugs.

We explain why a group of Tanzanian medical doctors decided to stay in their home country despite a massive brain drain and pressure to migrate. We argue that purpose-driven behaviour among medical doctors serves as a counterforce to brain drain, fostering human stickiness in a developing country context. A sense of purpose provides a novel lens to understand voluntary non-migration of highly-skilled professionals under extreme conditions. Furthermore, incoming expatriate doctors build local capacity by sharing skills and expertise with Tanzanian doctors. This affects the medical doctors’ motives to migrate, further reducing brain drain. These individual-level decisions not to migrate find their application in policy. We advocate policies that support purpose-driven behaviour and generate long-term commitment to a location, while advancing short-term mobility for knowledge sharing. The policy initiatives are targeted at actors in the sending and receiving countries as well as in international organisations, covering concerted multi-layered policies to support family and community embeddedness, to facilitate the incoming of expatriate doctors and foreign exchange, and to cultivate benefits of circular migration. We argue that migration behaviour is more individually grounded and socio-emotionally constructed than what dominant economic-based explanations suggest.