Growing Global: Foreign Investment and the internationalisation of Local business

Funded by an ESRC award, the project aimed to compare the role of multinational investors in influencing the internationalisation activities of local Scottish suppliers in the electronics and the oil-gas industries. As industries with high shares of FDI and exporting, research examined whether investors have supported the efforts of local suppliers to develop export markets. Based on a fieldwork survey of investors and suppliers in both industries, the study concluded that investors could provide significant assistance by helping their suppliers to ‘piggy-back’ into new markets, but the scale of this was highly dependent on industry factors. Such benefits from FDI were considerably more prevalent in the Scottish oil-gas than the electronics industry.