The Past Speaks

From an article in Foreign Affairs:

According to 2012 estimates from Morgan Stanley, companies headquartered in Europe generated just over 30 percent of their revenue from emerging markets, but U.S. companies got less than ten percent of their revenue from them. Corporate goals and management structures, which are similar among European and American firms, do not explain the difference. In fact, trends suggest that much of the wide transatlantic gap is a product of history — and of colonialism in particular.

The authors of the piece are:

Bhaskar Chakravorti is Senior Associate Dean for International Business and Finance at the Fletcher School, Tufts University, and founding Executive Director of Fletcher’s Institute for Business in the Global Context. His co-authors are Jianwei Dong and Kate Fedosova, who are Research Associates at the Institute for Business in the Global Context and graduate students at the Fletcher School.

Let’s file this under  “history matters to international business”.