“…With the onset of the COVID 19 pandemic in 2020, the impact on international trade and investment was observed to be similar to that of the 2008−2009 financial crisis and significantly worse than that of the recession of 2015 (UNCTAD, 2022b), which has prompted more research endeavors focused on investigating this particular domain. A surge can be observed in the review articles concentrating on facets of international trade and investment like the movement of direct investments (Campos et al., 2016; da Silva‐Oliveira et al., 2021), relationship between foreign investment and economic growth (Marinescu, 2021), foreign investment decision process (Raut et al., 2023), risk management in FDI (Pan et al., 2022), investment in sectors like gold and infrastructure projects (Jiang et al., 2021; Pattnaik et al., 2023), international business in disciplines of scientific research and marketing (Baena‐Rojas et al., 2020; Chabowski et al., 2013), country‐specific review of international business (Gil‐Barragan & Aguilera‐Castillo, 2020; Mukherjee et al., 2022) mainly using descriptive, thematic, and bibliometric analysis. But a comprehensive retrospective review of international trade and investment remains scarce, which provides motivation to conduct the present study.…”