MULTINATIONAL CORPORATION FINANCE AND ACCOUNTING: AN EMPIRICAL TRANSACTION COST ECONOMICS ANALYSIS

Leveraging on transaction cost economics, in this study, we analyse the economic drivers that affect multinational corporations (MNCs) leading them to off-shore source their finance and accounting (FA) activities. A survey was conducted to evaluate the significance of these drivers based on Malaysia-based international companies with FA offshore establishments. Analyses revealed that talent and technology significantly influence insourcing and implied that the MNCs made a trade-off between the costs of setting up their own foreign establishments and the value derived from resources they could own and manage. Aligned to past observations, it was found that these companies still believed in safely offshoring the routine activities but placed significant consideration on non-routine activities so far as insourcing was concerned. This denotes the presence of significant opportunities for both, the companies and the emerging countries, to drive offshore sourcing of FA to the next level, which is the sourcing of analytical and more complex activities. MNCs’ aspirations in offshoring FA activities deviate from solely seeking costs effectiveness or in acquiring FA professionals; these high specificity companies are seeking the availability of resources in terms of technology advancement and talent that could be trained with the specific knowledge of the companies.