Immigrant and native export benefiting from business collaborations: a global study

TL;DR

This study shows that immigrant entrepreneurs leverage their cross-country networks to enhance export performance more effectively than native entrepreneurs, highlighting the importance of migration status in business collaborations.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that immigrant entrepreneurs benefit more from collaborative networking for export success, using data from 71 countries and hierarchical linear modeling.

Findings

Immigrant entrepreneurs have higher levels of collaborative networking.

Networking positively influences export performance.

Migration status amplifies the benefits of collaboration for export.

Abstract

The authors hypothesised that export develops in the network of business collaborations that are embedded in migration status. In that, collaborative networking positively affects export performance and immigrant entrepreneurs enjoy higher collaborative networking than native entrepreneurs due to their advantage of being embedded in the home and the host country. Moreover, the advantage of being an immigrant promotes the benefits of collaborative networking for export compared to those of native entrepreneurs. A total of 47,200 entrepreneurs starting, running and owning firms in 71 countries were surveyed by Global Entrepreneurship Monitor and analysed through the hierarchical linear modelling technique. Collaborative networking facilitated export and migration status influenced entrepreneur networking, in that, immigrant entrepreneurs had a higher level of collaborative networking than native entrepreneurs. Consequently, immigrant entrepreneurs seemed to have benefited from their network collaborations more than their native counterparts did. This study sheds light on how immigrant entrepreneur network collaborations can be effective for their exporting.