Final Reflections: Emerging Market Multinational Enterprises in East Central Europe

Abstract

Although the current status of East Central European (ECE) countries in the process and level of their integration into global business varies, a rather general phenomenon is the exhaustion of the foreign direct investment (FDI)-led development model, at least its dominant version of the 1990s and early 2000s. On the one hand, this is a result of multinational affiliates’ isolated and strongly integrated presence in a strictly designed international cooperation system with no physical contact with local firms to deliver spillovers. On the other hand, even those affiliates that are entangled in the development of local supplier networks deliver spillovers only to a limited level. As a consequence, they are not becoming primary players of innovative local business clusters, while the design of affiliates’ activity range is usually specialized on low value-added segments of global value chains (GVC).