Individual attitudes towards the impact of multinational corporations on local businesses: how important are individual characteristics and country-level traits?

ABSTRACT

We study the importance of individual characteristics and national factors influencing individual attitudes towards the impact of multinational corporations on local businesses. Our sample includes more than 40 000 respondents in 29 countries from the 2003 National Identity Survey conducted by the International Social Survey Programme. We find that individual demographic factors and socioeconomic status, such as gender, age, income and education, are strong predictors of their attitudes. For example, income and education are positively associated with favourable attitudes towards the impact of multinational corporations (MNCs) on local businesses while age is negatively associated with individual attitudes towards MNCs. In addition, hierarchical ordered logit model results show that approximately 8% of total variations in individual attitudes around our sample mean are not explained by differences in personal traits. Instead, they are due to country-level heterogeneity such as, but not limited to, different degrees of openness or different aggregate income.

KEYWORDS:

• Individual attitudes
• MNCs
• impact on local business
• ISSP survey data

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• F23

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Kaya and Walker (2012) use a binary logit model.

² Australia, Austria, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Japan, Latvia, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Slovak, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, US and Uruguay.

³ Results excluding observations with extreme values are essentially identical to those reported in this article.

⁴ The probability is , where m = 1 – 5 and τ is the cut point value.

⁵ Based on Regression 2.2 estimates.

⁶

Additional information

Funding

This research is supported by the Center for Global and Economic Studies, Marquette University, and the Miles Research Grant from the College of Business Administration, Marquette University.