by Olga Annushkina

SDA Professor of Strategic and Entrepreneurial Management

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• Altri Post (16)

The recent political, social and military crisis in Ukraine had a huge impact on the economic environment in Ukraine and in Russia and in global markets. Russian Ruble plunged, Russian stock prices went down, the price of gold started climbing back as a response to the war rumors, the energy prices started rising. In the interconnected economies, the issues at stake regard the mutual trade and investment relations, among all the issue of oil and natural gas (see Figure 1).

The growing uncertainty at the Europe’s South-East once again brought up the issue of risks associated to doing business in emerging markets and the main differences in business contexts in “developed” and “emerging” economies: the institutional context.

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by Olga Annushkina

SDA Professor of Strategic and Entrepreneurial Management

• Profilo
|
• Altri Post (16)

We’ve met with the Vice-rector of Kaliningrad International Business School (KIBS), Oleg Alferov, during the executive education program organized by SDA Bocconi and KIBS for Russian entrepreneurs and managers in October 2013. So when I thought of the first topic for “Doing business in…” Kaliningrad region of Russia idea emerged “naturally”: the smallest and the most European Russian region largely unknown to Italian and European companies who concentrate their attention on Moscow and Saint Petersburg has a unique and a “niche” combination of “Russian-ness” and “European-ness”.
The idea of this conversation, as of others that I hope will follow on other foreign regions of potential interest for Italian companies, is to start filling the informational voids on what we call the “liability of foreignness”, or “costs” or “disadvantages” of doing business abroad. Firms’ competitive advantages on foreign markets can be strongly threatened by ignorance of local cultural, legislative and economic context. As most of studies treat cultural, administrative, geographic and economic or “CAGE” distances on a country level, I strongly believe that the interregional differences within any single country matter the most. So let us talk about “Doing business in Kaliningrad”, rather than a generic “doing business in Russia”. Leggi tutto →