Revisiting the Internationalization-Performance Relationship: A Twenty-Year Meta-Analysis of Emerging Market Multinationals

With the rapid growth of emerging market multinational enterprises (EMNEs), increasing interest has been focused on exploring the internationalization-performance (I-P) relationship of EMNEs. Yet findings on the relationship remain contradictory. Although researchers emphasize the home-country-bounded nature of EMNEs, less is known about how home-government features and the EMNEs’ political mindset affect their internationalization and performance. This study integrates and extends the literature on the I-P relationship of EMNEs using a meta-analysis covering a dataset of 218 effect sizes from 186 retrieved studies published between 1998 and 2021. Findings show that the I-P relationship is overall positive, yet it varies across diverse research designs and emerging markets and regions. Also, our findings indicate that home-country government quality and transformability exert significant positive impacts on the relationship, while nationalism negatively moderates the government’s impacts on the relationship. This study pushes the boundaries of EMNE literature through conceptualizing home-government features and incorporating consideration of nationalism in this research field.