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Governments faced formidable challenges in coordinating public health responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aims to enhance the understanding of effective organizational leadership during crises by investigating the factors influencing the turnover of health leaders during the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil.

Using primary data encompassing all appointments and dismissals of federal and state health secretaries, this paper conducted a quantitative analysis of the relational and reputational factors that contributed to leader turnover during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper also examined whether leaders’ management and public health experience increase the duration of tenure.

States encountered significant challenges in retaining experienced and effective leadership during the health emergency, primarily due to political conflicts in policymaking and, to a lesser extent, allegations of corruption. Furthermore, leaders with expertise in public health were found to be less likely to be removed from office. However, managerial experience did not prolong the tenure of state health secretaries during the emergency.

Since most health leaders have public health and management experience, the contributions of each factor to the duration of a secretary’s tenure are difficult to separate and analyze separately.

This study provides empirical insights into what factors drive health leader turnover during major health emergencies.

During major health emergencies, health leaders often strongly disagree with elected officials on the response. This paper test how crisis leadership theories help explain state health leaders’ duration in one of the world’s largest public health systems during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper find that policy disagreements contributed to significant turnover.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first that are aware of that uses novel primary data on public health executive leader characteristics and turnover causes in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. It provides empirical evidence contributing to the crisis leadership literature by examining health leader turnover in one of the world’s largest public health systems.

This paper aims to investigate the political involvement of a corporate foundation (CF) though CSR under two perspectives: CF managers and the sponsor firm managers.

A single case with a Brazilian CF was conducted. Interviews with sponsor firms and foundations managers were combined with firms’ sustainability reports data and CF’s website information.

It was found that CF acts as an ambassador and can be a source of political legitimacy for their sponsor firm. They intermediate in governance challenges as the goals and working style of the CF, firms and municipalities can be sometimes antagonistic.

The authors could not reach the municipalities officials and their perception of the Public Management Program (PMP).

The PMP creates personal and organizational relationships with public officials, a resource that can be employed to impact the political strategies of the sponsor firm.

The authors also show how CF’s may help managers to deal with the typical Brazilian peculiarity of policy discontinuity in local governments.

This case study sheds light a new phenomenon: CF’s support on public management. It adds to the CSR and corporate political activities literature, the role of foundations as ambassadors of the relationship between the firm, government and society. They are not only filling gaps left by the State but are also dealing with local governments administrative deficiencies.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the relevant aspects that influence foreign subsidiary’s performance and remain how they retain competitiveness in international markets during economic crisis. To investigate this effect, this research analyzes the behavior of Japanese subsidiaries located in European countries during the pre- and post-crisis periods that started in the USA in 2008 and spread all over the world.

This is a quantitative study with an analysis based on longitudinal data of foreign subsidiaries of Japanese multinational firms during the period 2006-2013. It applies a multiple linear regression with panel data using fixed effects models.

The findings show that within-firm factors related to local experiential knowledge, market entry through joint ventures with partners from the same nationality, and subsidiary management with a team of expatriates all have a positive impact on subsidiary performance during times of economic crisis. Moreover, within-country factors involving macroeconomic aspects related to inflation rate and population income indicators show a negative impact on performance. Finally, the results confirm that subsidiary performance is higher in the pre-crisis period, showing the importance of considering economic crisis aspects in longitudinal studies.

The result has implications for managers of multinational firms to understand which factors most impact the success of their foreign subsidiaries during times of economic crisis. In this way, managers can, with greater confidence, decide to reach the most important performance indicator in subsidiary management.

The majority of studies on economic crisis is based on an economic perspective and mostly investigates Asian and Argentinean crises. When considering a firm-level perspective, most research studies conducted on a subsidiary level are cross-sectional or use survival as a measure of performance. This paper applies a longitudinal study using subsidiary-level data and analyzes performance by sales and productivity measurement. In addition, it investigates whether or not within-country and within-firm factors impacted subsidiary performance during the 2008 economic crisis.

The purpose of this paper is to identify whether the new Chinese phenomenon of going global in groups represents a more advantageous market entry mode than the phenomena considered in previous studies.

In this empirical research paper, the authors draw upon the literature in academic journals and books regarding the Chinese special economic zones overseas to analyze and compare collective internationalization (i.e. going global in groups) with traditional market entry modes as per the ownership, location and internalization paradigm (OLI) and transaction cost approach (TCA).

The authors identified that financial and diplomatic support provided by the Chinese Government has reinforced internationalization in groups, thereby minimizing some structural risks in host countries. Pre-operational and operating costs have been lowered or shared among group members, and weighted average cost of capital has dropped due to the availability of specific funding lines with subsidized interest rates.

Given the lack of available literature on the topic, the authors based their study of the collective internationalization of Chinese firms on very few cases, most of which represent market entry in African countries.

The study calls attention to a new, more efficient and less risky characteristic of international entry modes, which implies that companies can reap multiple benefits by entering markets in global groups.

As literature addressing market entry modes focuses mostly on individual enterprises, this paper contributes to the identification of advantages in collective internationalization.

This paper aims to analyze how the Brazilian and Chinese outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) policies can contribute to the economic development of their home countries.

The aforementioned objective is achieved through a comparative analysis of the Brazilian and Chinese OFDI policies within a new theoretical framework for examining the developmental implications of OFDI. Both primary and secondary data are utilized to compare Brazilian and Chinese strategies.

It was concluded that Brazil and China have shifted from a development strategy centered on internal market self-sufficiency to one that seeks international economic prominence by, among other strategies, adopting OFDI support as a part of their industrial policy agenda. However, while the Chinese Government has focused on cross-national acquisitions of assets that are scarce within the country, the Brazilian Government has preferred to support industries that are already highly competitive internationally. The Chinese strategy has a greater potential to generate positive spillovers to domestic economy.

This paper ends with recommendations on how Brazil, in particular, and emerging economies, in general, may improve their OFDI policies.

The contribution of this paper to the existent literature relies both on its approach and on its theoretical framework. Differing from the majority of the studies on the internationalization of companies from emerging economies, this paper emphasizes the importance of industrial policies to support OFDI and the developmental dimension of these policies. The authors believe that the theoretical framework developed here can be extended to further analysis of OFDI policies from other emerging economies. Policymakers may also benefit from the conclusions of this research.

The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate that, despite the extensive literature on firm-specific advantages (FSAs) and country-specific advantages (CSAs) produced since Rugman’s classic matrix (1981), little progress has been made in empirically operationalizing the second concept.

Through a review of the international business (IB) literature that refers to the CSA concept, we identify the “vagueness” in the usage of this concept. First, we present a concise literature review of the CSA construct, with a link to the “double diamond” theoretical model of Rugman and D’Cruz (1993) and Rugman and Verbeke (1993). Second, we present the results of the bibliographic analysis on the use of the construct by a variety of authors.

We demonstrate the weak conceptual grounding of the CSA concept by reviewing the literature on host-CSAs attracting Chinese overseas foreign direct investment (OFDI). Apart from the fact that various authors use different sources of data, an important reason for contradictory results is the fact that each author tests host-CSA through different indicators. Here, we propose a list of variables and indicators based on the “double diamond” model and test these empirically.

IB researchers should start conducting serious studies on home-CSAs and host-CSAs instrumental to attracting investments, defining clear indicators and using replicable data based on publicly available information. This chapter is the first to show that the concepts developed by Rugman (1981) and expanded by Rugman, A. M. and Verbeke, A. (2008) (Internalization theory and its impact on the field of international business. Research in Global Strategic Management, 14, 155–174) are relevant to advance in the quantitative operationalization of concepts within IB theory.

The aim of the paper is to introduce a special issue which looks at the collaboration between the Brazilian state and Brazilian corporations with regard to the transnational activities of the latter.

Departing from the state of the art of current studies of emerging market multinationals, the paper highlights the need for interdisciplinary work to understand the particular role of the state with regard to the outward expansion of these companies. The paper then highlights the different approaches the five papers of the special issue have taken to address this task.

Although Brazil can be counted among the most liberal emerging markets, the special issue finds a very close cooperation between the Brazilian state and Brazilian multinationals. The former helps to finance overseas expansion of Brazilian multinationals, supports the solution of conflicts with the governments of neighboring countries and articulates the interests of Brazilian multinationals in global governance. The problems created by this close cooperation rather materialize with third parties, in particular with somewhat poorer countries in the Brazilian neighborhood, but also with smaller companies, consumers or radical social movements in Brazil.

The paper shows the diversity of approaches that an interdisciplinary cooperation between Political Science, Political Economy, Development Studies and International Business can mobilize to make sense of very close state-business cooperation with regard to transnational activities of emerging markets multinationals.