Location behavior and spatial organization of multinational firms and their impact on regional transformation in East Asia: A comparative study of Japanese, Korean, and U.S. electronics firms

This study is concerned with location behavior and spatial organization of multinational firms (MNFs) and their impact on regional transformation. Over the last several decades, foreign direct investment (FDI) has accelerated throughout the world. FDI has mostly been carried out by MNFs as a part of their corporate restructuring strategies. A large modern firm, a MNF, is organized in different activity-units such as headquarters (HQs), research and development (R&D) laboratories, trial-production plants, mass-production plants, management and sales branches, and other units. The worldwide location of activity-units of MNFs significantly affects regional and urban structures of both developed countries and developing countries. This empirical study aims to demonstrate that the recent regional transformation is closely related to the location behavior and spatial organization of modern large firms, MNFs. For this purpose, we focus on fourteen large electronics MNFs, which include nine Japanese firms, two Korean firms, and three U.S. firms. We examine their global locational behavior and spatial reorganization during the past two decades. Our study indicates that the spatial organizational behavior of MNFs significantly affects the transformation of regional economies worldwide. It also suggests that the spatial organization of MNFs is closely related to the urban system, and that the regional structural change of one country is closely interrelated with that of other countries through the spatial behavior of MNFs