We are proud to share that a paper by Oxford TMCD Centre Director, Professor Xiaolan Fu, alongside co-authors, Jun Hou and Marco Sanfilippo, has won the International Business Review (IBR) Best Journal Paper of the Year Award for 2018.

The International Business Review is the European International Business Academy’s (EIBA) flagship journal published by Elsevier. It awards the prize to the best IBR article (published in the previous year's volume) in terms of enhancing the field of International Business research in the future.

The award winning paper is entitled ‘Highly Skilled Returnees and the Internationalization of EMNEs: Firm level evidence from China’.

It empirically examines the impact of the Chinese Knowledge Diaspora and their contribution to the development and global expansion of Chinese MNEs into international markets. The authors argue that these ‘Highly Skilled Returnees’ are an important channel by which latecomer firms acquire experiential knowledge necessary to explore foreign markets via FDI or to internationalize to access foreign resources, knowledge or enhance production efficiency. The authors test their hypotheses using a sample of firms from Guangdong Province, a coastal region accounting for a large proportion of China’s total economic output and an attractive destination for many returning skilled emigrants.

The article makes several important conclusions. Firstly, their findings corroborate that there is a strong, positive correlation between firms’ choice of hiring returnees and their propensity to embark in active international expansion through FDI. However, their data also indicates that there is differentiated impact on returnees and their contribution to firm-level internationalization. Returnees who occupy strategic management and sales positions have a stronger influence on both the propensity and intensity of firm-level FDI. Finally, the paper also observes that integrating the Knowledge Diaspora is particularly effective for less-experienced firms by acting as a time-efficient mechanism to acquire the resources, networks and knowledge necessary to invest globally.

The article can be read here