Geography, Location, and Strategy

Even in a world without national borders, geographic distance would constrain the interaction between consumers and producers of goods and services. While advances in communication and transportation technology make the world ever smaller by facilitating transactions over larger distances, national borders continue to segment both factor and final goods markets. Consumer preferences are often more similar within borders than across them; the costs of human resources and other production inputs reflect differences in country-level endowments; and localized institutions govern all aspects of economic exchange.

These figurative “distances” between countries can help or hinder firms in their quest to create value (Ghemawat, 2013). Moreover, each aspect of cross-country difference influences the mechanisms by which firms are able to capture the value they create. This volume presents recent research on how and why firms cross national borders.