Regional Motives for Post-Entry Subsidiary Development: The Case of Poland

Abstract

The issue of location-specific factors of a multinational company’s activities has long been investigated by international business scholars. To our knowledge, however, all these studies have put attention on the pre-entry location decision of foreign subsidiaries, rather than the post-entry decision. As such, by incorporating a regional perspective into the study of a subsidiary’s development this work offers an understanding of the importance of location-specific factors for the post-entry development of a multinational company’s subsidiaries at the regional level. The empirical analysis, used in this work, utilises a discrete-choice model with primary data from an online survey of 91 foreign-owned subsidiaries in Poland. The results demonstrate that the Mazowieckie region is the most attractive location for post-entry subsidiary development if knowledge-seeking factors are important to MNCs. Further, the findings indicate that South-East and South-West regions are more favoured for post-entry subsidiary development when efficiency-seeking factors are important to multinational companies. The findings also show that none of the examined regions are significant for the post-entry subsidiary’s development if agglomerations factors and infrastructure are important to multinational companies.