Hello! Namaste? Within-country linguistic diversity and infrastructure projects in emerging markets

This paper investigates the impact of within-country linguistic diversity on the performance of private participation infrastructure projects. In view of the relevance of language heterogeneity in Asia, we first test a sample of 2921 projects in 7 countries in this region from 1990 to 2013. The find...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of business research 2021-06, Vol.130, p.86-97
Main Authors: Jiménez, Alfredo, Bayraktar, Secil
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Business schools
Emerging markets
Government business enterprises
Government ownership
Greenfield
Private participation infrastructure projects
Within-country linguistic diversity
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:This paper investigates the impact of within-country linguistic diversity on the performance of private participation infrastructure projects. In view of the relevance of language heterogeneity in Asia, we first test a sample of 2921 projects in 7 countries in this region from 1990 to 2013. The findings indicate that higher linguistic diversity is associated with a lower likelihood of project success, and that this negative effect is weakened when the project is greenfield. In contrast, we find no significant effect for projects that include government ownership. Subsequently, we explore the differences between domestic versus foreign projects, as well as a larger sample of countries worldwide. The study contributes to the current debate in the literature by pointing out that within-country linguistic diversity can be a threat to private participation projects, offering useful managerial recommendations on how to reduce this threat.
ISSN:0148-2963
1873-7978
DOI:10.1016/j.jbusres.2021.02.063