Family Businesses Motives for Internationalisation: Evidence from Serbia

This book chapter contributes to understanding of family firms in Serbia by examining the importance for national economy, business ambient for work and sustained businesses, as well as institutional infrastructure support, educational, innovation and financial support. This chapter seeks to explain resource-seeking internationalization among Serbian family firms, which belong mostly to SMEs, by investigating, based on based on resource dependency theory and the model of entrepreneurial internationalization, whether resource-seeking internationalization can be linked to a family businesses’ resource deficiencies. It researches whether perceived resource constraints in terms of labor, finance and new technology increase the likelihood of family firms to use internationalization as a means to access or acquire the lacking resources, relative to not internationalizing. By binomial logistic regression analysis method used for the testing in the chapter are elaborated the findings which indicate that perceived lack of skilled labor drives family firms to pursue internationalization as a means for accessing labor and that perceived constraints regarding access to finance are an important determinant for family firms to pursue foreign markets as a means to access capital. These results suggest that perceived constraints in terms of skilled labor and finance are pushing firms to overcome internal resource deficiencies through internationalization, as well as that, these firms which are already internationally active to use their international activity as a means to access or acquire these resources. The contribution of the chapter could be seen also in the suggestion that resource-constrained family firms can be considered as entrepreneurial firms that proactively exploit internationalization as a strategy for addressing current resource needs. The findings of the research also support the awareness of the mangers/owners of the family firms of the possibility to use internationalization as a means for overcoming resource constraints, as well as policy makers awareness increase to improve general doing business parameters in the country giving that internationalization could become easier and resources could become more easily transferable across borders.