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國際化與績效之分量迴歸分析
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completely adopt internationalization strategies, which could explain why we observe
inconsistent conclusions on the influence of internationalization on performance. This
study therefore hypothesizes that the contributions of internationalization on performance
may vary with firms’ operating scales. Hence, the appropriate internationalization
strategies and configurations should vary with sizes of firms.
Internationalization is a wide-ranging and complex business behavior. Applying just a
single indicator to measure internationalization will likely gain a partial property of
internationalization on performance of firms. This is another possible reason why the
relationship between the two does not achieve a consistent conclusion. We therefore
construct multi-dimensional indices to measure degrees of internationalization: the depth
of internationalization, the breadth of internationalization, and the experience of
internationalization. The depth of internationalization measures a firm’s dependence on
the foreign market. The breadth of internationalization reflects the degree of a firm’s
geographic diversification. The experience of internationalization represents the
knowledge a firm has accumulated from previous operations abroad. Hence, we propose
the following hypotheses to be empirically investigated by the data of Taiwanese
manufacturing firms.
H1: The marginal contribution from the depth of internationalization is greater for
larger firms.
H2: The marginal benefit from the breadth of internationalization is greater for
larger firms.
H3: The marginal effect of international experience to larger firms is smaller than
that to smaller companies.
Taiwan is an open economy with a small domestic market and few natural resources,
consequently, our economic development must depend heavily on international trade. For
instance, the value of exports accounted for 73.66 percent of gross domestic product
(GDP) and that of exports plus imports was 140.13 percent of GDP in 2010. It is well
known that Taiwan’s economy has been growing at a rapid pace with per capita income
growing from US$196 in 1952 to US$18,603 in 2010. Lucas (1993) argues that the
economic miracle of Taiwan comes from the rapid accumulation of human capital to push
economic growth, which results from learning-by doing through a huge volume of
exports. Taiwan’s FDI took off in 1986 and most FDI in recent years have been