| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立暨南國際大學 === 國際企業學系 === 88 === Business activities and firms around the world are increasingly internationalized. The relationship between internationalization and firm performance becomes an interesting research topic. Previous studies, however, showed inconclusive and contradictory empirical results. As internationalization is inevitably critical to business firms’ growth, studies on the internationalization of firms from newly industrialized countries such as Taiwan are few. This study modifies theoretical framework about performance effect of internationalization, and empirically tests the proposed model using Taiwan’s manufacturing firms as sample.
After reviewing the literature on firm internationalization, this study examines performance effects of three distinctive attributes of internationalization: “scope of overseas value activities,” “degree of involvement in foreign markets,” and “international operation diversification.” The hypotheses and empirical findings are summarized as follows. (1) Hypothesis 1 proposes that the scope of overseas value activities has a positive relationship with firm performance. However, empirical results show insignificant effect. (2) Hypothesis 2 presents that the degree of foreign market involvement has an inverted U-shaped relationship with firm performance. Empirical findings support this hypothesis. (3) Hypothesis 3a suggests that the dispersion of international operations in different countries has a positive relationship with firm performance. Empirical results confirm this hypothesis. (4) Hypothesis 3b argues that the more equally distributed the firm’s international operations, the better the performance. However, the findings indicate an inverted U-shaped relationship between the entropy index and firm performance. This implies that, compared with multinational firms from developed countries, Taiwan’s manufacturing firms are relatively small, and may not be equipped with enough resources and capabilities to manage international operations equally dispersed over different geographic areas.
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