no / The longitudinal properties of outward FDI and multinational company (MNC) strategies and activities have been extensively investigated by international business scholars (Buckley et al., 2007; Butler and Domingo, 1998; Liu et al., 2005). There has, however, been less investigation of the role of outward FDI in the debates about regionalism and globalization (Buckley, 2009a; Rugman, 2003; Rugman and Verbeke, 2004). In principle, if significant numbers of MNCs are developing ‘global factory’-type strategies, this should be accompanied by marked changes in outward FDI that lead to step changes in trend FDI flows as firms engage in substantial new off-shoring operations and complex foreign investments to reap the benefits from the increasing opportunities to internationalize their activities (Buckley, 2009b; Buckley and Ghauri, 2004). An alternative view is that internationalization is primarily a regional process, whereby MNCs conduct most of their activities in the major economic regions of the world, and that this has not changed significantly despite growing trade and capital liberalization (Rugman 2003, 2005; Rugman and Hodgetts, 2001). Thus although new areas such as China and India are increasingly part of the global economy and have become major regional areas, this process does not lead to large-scale changes in the underlying determinants of FDI. In this view, outward FDI trends are likely to be stable in the long run in which shocks to the system do not disturb long-run trends.