Has the International Banking and Financial Crisis Damaged Emerging Market MNCs?

Abstract

We examine how the international financial crisis of 2007–2010 has impacted on the performance of emerging market MNCs relative to their developed market counterparts. We present our multinational classification system and categorise the world's largest firms, the Global Fortune 500 (GF500), according to their degree of multinationality. We show that the number of GF500 firms from emerging markets has increased significantly over the past decade, and that the international financial crisis of 2007–2010 has further enhanced this trend. We compare the relative risk-adjusted performance of emerging and developed markets before and since the international financial crisis. We show that although the GF500 firms from developed markets tend to be more multinational than the GF500 firms from emerging markets, the latter have outperformed the former over the past decade – both before and after the recent international financial crisis.