Outward foreign direct investment by Brazilian and Indian multinational companies: comparison with Russian-Chinese multinationals

Abstract

International audience ; The purpose of this paper is to complete an overall comparative study of outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) from BRIC countries and strategies conducted by multinational corporations (MNCs) whose parent companies are based in the BRICs 2. In a sense, it is a follow-up to three previous companion papers (Andreff, 2013a, 2013b & 2014) which already compared OFDI and strategies of those MNCs based in the two post-communist transition economies, China and Russia, which are classified with Brazil and India into the BRICs group. Here the focus is on Brazilian and Indian MNCs and their OFDI using as a benchmark major outcomes derived from the study of Chinese and Russian multinationals (Table 1). Such a benchmark does not mean that we were expecting at the starting point of this research to find the same OFDI features and MNC strategies for firms based in Brazil and India as those identified for Chinese and Russian companies that have extended their investments abroad. To the contrary the intent is to check, against a benchmark of MNCs emerging from former centrally planned economies with a single (communist) party regime, how much the differences in Brazilian and Indian market economies with a democratic political regime over the past decades 3 countervail (or not) the assumed similarities across all the BRICs. The study by Holtbrügge & Kreppel (2012) indeed covers all the four BRICs " OFDI though only with case studies of eight companies. 3 Even though India has had a system of central planning from the 1950s on (but not a centralised mandatory quantitative planning as in former Soviet countries) until 1991 and Brazil has endeavoured some decades of authoritarian political regime before the 1990s.