Korea's multinationals in a regional world

Basic theory suggests that multinational enterprises (MNEs) succeed when they develop firm-specific advantages (FSAs). In Korea, large MNEs, mostly chaebols, have built successful knowledge based FSAs. They are also utilizing scale economies based on Korea's country-specific advantages (CSAs) in skilled labor and a supporting government. In the empirical work, we find that the Korean MNEs use their FSAs to operate mainly on a home region basis, much like the world's other large MNEs.