A historical review of the information technology and business process captive centre sector

A captive centre is a business unit that is owned and provides services to the parent firm from an offshore location. In this paper we seek to apply a historical perspective in order to understand what factors shaped its development path. In particular we are interested to document and explain changes that took place in the captive sector vis-à-vis extant country attractiveness frameworks. To achieve this objective, we examine changes that multinationals introduced in their offshore captive investments concerning the type of the captive they set up, the functions they offshored through a captive centre and to which location. Information was collected from secondary sources on offshore captive investments made by Fortune 250 global firms between 1985 and 2010. On the basis of the analysis the paper considers the importance of disrupting factors to the extant country selection literature.

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