Relationship between Chinese firms' Internationalization and Environmental performance: An empirical evidence

Internationalization and corporate sustainability expenditure: The role of institutional support and foreign knowledge acquisition

“…The level of internationalization relates to the strategic "importance that a firm assigns to serving specific foreign markets" (Marano et al, 2016), while the scope reflects the heterogeneity of internationalization activities across regions (Kolk et al, 2014). These distinctions are important because research insights indicate that significant variations in firms' sustainability activities may be due to differences in internationalization's form, level, and scope (Comim, 2020;G omez-Bolaños et al, 2022). For example, in a study of Chinese multinationals (Comim, 2020), a widely used proxy measure of internationalization, such as total exports to total revenue, was not significantly linked to the extent of firms' sustainability performance.…”

“…These distinctions are important because research insights indicate that significant variations in firms' sustainability activities may be due to differences in internationalization's form, level, and scope (Comim, 2020;G omez-Bolaños et al, 2022). For example, in a study of Chinese multinationals (Comim, 2020), a widely used proxy measure of internationalization, such as total exports to total revenue, was not significantly linked to the extent of firms' sustainability performance. However, measures based on a higher level and scope of international operations (e.g., foreign assets to total assets and the number of foreign subsidiaries) were found to be significantly associated with international firms' sustainability practices.…”

“…Interestingly, other studies (Boso et al, 2017;Comim, 2020;Muller, 2018;Park, 2018), produce mixed results regarding the relationship between internationalization and corporate sustainability behaviors. Additionally, some studies show that firms operating in high quality (Zhang et al, 2021), more regulated (G omez-Bolaños et al, 2022;Luo et al, 2022) institutional environments, or those with extensive subsidiaries in countries with strong political and legal institutions (Attig et al, 2016), have higher corporate social responsibility ratings.…”

“…For over two decades, the contentious debate regarding the link between firms' level of internationalization and their sustainability performance or behavior has continued to be of great academic interest. The outcomes from a large stream of research (Agnihotri & Bhattacharya, 2019;Attig et al, 2016;Comim, 2020;G omez-Bolaños et al, 2020;Luo et al, 2022;Tokas & Yadav, 2020;Zhang et al, 2021), suggest that the more firms depend on foreign sales, the more they devote resources to sustainability issues. Stated differently, multinational enterprises (MNEs), compared to their domestic peers, tend to pay greater attention to sustainability matters in their efforts to meet the expectations and requirements of global stakeholders.…”

“…First, prior research on the topic largely focused on examining a direct linear relationship between the constructs (G omez-Bolaños et al, 2020;Park, 2018), based on legitimacy theory of the multinational firm. However, the fact that determinants of firms' sustainable practices in international markets comprise a complex combination of internal and external factors, warrants additional research using an expanded theoretical lens (Comim, 2020). Consequently, this study investigates the effects of two possible moderating factors on the hypothesized link between internationalization and sustainability outcomes.…”