CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2014
| Author | Tepavcevic, Sanja |
|---|---|
| Title | RUSSIAN FOREIGN POLICY AND OUTWARD FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENTS: COOPERATION, SUBORDINATION, OR DISENGAGEMENT? |
| Summary | This dissertation contributes to the literature on Russian foreign policy and the literature on Russian outward foreign direct investments by investigating the relationships between the two in instances of outward foreign investments of Russian transnational corporations. The research focuses on forms and mechanisms of cooperation between Russian state institutions and Russian companies abroad. As the central republic of world’s former military superpower and its direct successor in international organizations, one of the world’s largest oil and gas exporters, and territorially the world’s largest country, Russia has usually been perceived as an imperial expansionist. The assertive foreign policy rhetoric of its political leadership has contributed to these perceptions. As a result, outward foreign direct investments of Russian companies, especially those of energy-exporting companies, have been perceived as agents channeling Russian national interests abroad. They have also been portrayed as such by most of the literature on Russian foreign policy and by the largely fragmented literature on Russian outward foreign direct investments. However, empirical observation has shown that there have been a significant number of mismatches between rhetoric about the activities of Russian companies abroad and their actual action. Therefore, the dissertation addresses two general and one specific question: What is the relation between Russian foreign policy and foreign direct investments? To what extent, if at all, is Russian foreign policy important in Russian outward foreign direct investments? Under what conditions and in which forms do Russian state institutions and Russian companies abroad cooperate with each other? While a few scholars have recognized business interests as motives that drive Russian outward investments, other non-political motives for Russian FDI have largely been neglected in the literature. The dissertation relies on an extensive dataset consisting of official documents and iimore than seventy interviews. The core is forty interviews with representatives of Russian state institutions (ministries, embassies, and trade and commercial representative offices abroad) and representatives of Russian transnational corporations and small-and-medium enterprises in Germany, Hungary, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Qualitative content analysis is used in the analysis of the data. Results demonstrate that although business interests serve as the most frequent drivers of Russian outward foreign direct investments and are quite frequently mixed with individual profit-seeking interests of Russian private companies’ owners and managers of state-owned companies, the latter usually portray them as Russian national interests. Therefore, in contrast to the widely shared view in the literature on Russian foreign policy, state institutions abroad usually serve the business interests of Russian companies, and not vice versa. Most importantly, the results show that cooperation between Russian state institutions and Russian companies abroad depends on a combination of economic factors – four characteristics of the host market (size, sophistication, regulations of foreign direct investments, and competition by other foreign investors) and social factors (reactions to Russian investments in host country). The more complex the host market (including reactions to Russian foreign direct investments), the more Russian companies aim to intensify cooperation with Russian state institutions in a host country in instances of foreign direct investments. |
| Supervisor | Béla Greskovits |
| Department | Political Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2014/tepavcevic_sanja.pdf |
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