Political risk and internationalization of enterprises: a literature review

Abstract

This work aims to analyze how the national and international literature has explored variables that have an impact on the perception of political risk within an enterprise’s internationalization process. The lack of specialized bibliography in Brazil and the difficulty for entrepreneurs to plan the internationalization hinder reaching clear parameters of how to measure political risk and strategies to mitigate this type of risk. The bibliographical section of Kobrin from 1978 was used a theoretical framework and whose definitions provided the initial parameter to identify the opinions of other authors on the topic. The methodology used gathered bibliographic content for defining political risk in 41 articles of international journals downloaded from databases made available on the Internet and handled through the software program EndNote 6. A content analysis using the software “R” identified “variables” as a sub-topic. The discussion presents the identification of political, economic, and socio-cultural variables that can be quantified in future studies and will make it possible to establish a mitigation of the risks and achieve success in the internationalization process.

Keywords:
Political Risk; Internationalization Process of Enterprises; Foreign Investment; Host Country.