Poverty alleviation of multinational enterprises in home country: symbolic or substantive?

The current study focuses on poverty alleviation programs of multinational enterprises (MNEs). By adopting the attention-based view (ABV), we suggest that the poverty issue of subsidiary’s host country affects MNE headquarter’s decisions regarding symbolic versus substantive poverty alleviation efforts in home country. The findings demonstrate the bottom-up attentional processing mechanism upon which foreign subsidiaries channel poverty issues in the host countries to the MNEs’ headquarters in the home country, and show that the poverty of subsidiary’s host country has a positive effect on MNE’s substantive poverty alleviation in the home country. In line with three principles of ABV, MNE’s industrial diversification, CEO’s famine experience in childhood, and Confucian cultures of headquarter location will moderate this relationship via top-down attentional processing. Panel data of Chinese MNEs in 2016–2019 are used to test the theories. Findings present implications for MNE headquarter-subsidiary relationship study, ABV literature, and CSR research.