Political risk and companies’ internationalization: a literature review

Abstract

This work aims to analyze how the national and international literature has explored variables that impact the perception of political risk within a company’s internationalization process. The lack of specialized bibliography in Brazil and the difficulty for entrepreneurs to plan interna­tionalization, hinder the gathering of clear parameters to measure political risk, as well as making it difficult to set up strategies to mitigate such risks. As a theoretical framework, the literature strand from Kobrin (1978) was used. Kobrin’s settings provided the initial framework to identify the opinions of other authors on the subject. The methodology sought to gather bibliographic content for political risk definition in 41 articles of international journals downloaded from databases available on the Internet and treated through the program Endnotes 6. A content analysis using the software “R” identified “variables” as a sub-theme. The discussion presents the identification of political, eco­nomic and socio-cultural variables that can be quantified in future studies and make it possible to establish the possibility of mitigating risks and succeeding in internationalization processes.