International information seeking behaviour of South African exporters

While there are many requirements for making successful decisions, the raw material is information. Nowhere is this more evident than in the international arena. As Czinkota (1991:86) wrote: 'Information is even more important in the international setting, where entirely new parameters and environments are encountered.' Unfortunately, in spite of the growing importance of international trade, little knowledge exists about how firms gather information outside of their home country. The recognition of this lack of research has lead to a special call for papers by International Marketing Review in 2001, looking at this issue. There are a plethora of studies that look at how domestic firms gather information (e.g. Prescott and Bhardwaj, 1995, looked at the type of information collected by American firms). However, with the exception of a handful of studies (e.g. Bodur and Cavusgal 1985; Calof 1997; Hart, Webb and Jones 1994; Souchon and Diamantopoulos 1999; Mohamad, Zafar and Honeycutt 2001) it is not known whether these findings apply in an international context. More important for this study, research to date has focused on developed countries (Canada, United States and the United Kingdom) and not on an emerging or an economy in transition, such as the South African on

Internationalization and alliance formation : evidence from Turkish SMEs

This study explores the issue of internationalization through forming alliances with foreign capital in the small business sector in Turkey. Using a sample of 257 SMEs from this emerging market economy, collected via a field study, it finds that Turkish SMEs would like to form alliances with foreign capital for expanding their production capacity and accessing to world markets. Multivariate multinomial logit models are employed to analyse the survey data econometrically. Size-specific, sector-specific and management-specific factors are identified in the alliance motivation. The `market\u27 and `finance\u27 aspects of alliances prevail in the multivariate analysis with significant implications. There is also evidence that some conditional relationships offered by multivariate analysis differ from unconditional associations found in the survey, which implies that alliance motivation is partly a product of multidimensional decision-making process on behalf of SMEs. <br /

Country and Size Effects in Financial Ratios: A European Perspective

Harmonised aggregate financial statements are published by the European Commission in the BACH database. This information is organised by country, size of firm, and year. Financial ratios obtained from this database are analysed using multivariate statistical techniques in order to explore country and size effects. The data relates to three size groups, eleven countries, fourteen years, and fifteen financial and economic ratios. It is found that ratios reflect the size of the firm, but that the way in which this is reflected varies between the different countries. It is also found that there are no significant size related differences in financial profitability, but that such differences appear when countries are compare