Purpose This paper aims to analyze how emerging market firms upgrade their capabilities by focusing on “uncommoditizing strategies” that enable them to achieve levels of international competitiveness beyond the comparative advantages of their home countries and serve markets with premium pricing, quality and reputation of products. Design/methodology/approach In this paper, the authors studied 18 Latin American companies across six countries. Latin America represents an ideal setting because many of these countries have traditionally developed using natural resource endowments, and their firms have tended to rely on these in their internationalization. To facilitate the analysis of each case and the comparisons across cases, the authors used the same analytical framework for the companies, identifying the sources of differentiation and cost efficiency strategies that enabled these firms to upgrade their capabilities and compete on the basis of premium pricing, quality and reputation. Findings The analysis identified a general framework that represents an abstraction of the actions taken by these companies over time. The proposed model consists of three main elements used to pursue uncommoditizing strategies: tropicalized innovation, global efficiency and coordinated control. Originality/value Recent research on emerging market firms has shown interest in how these firms upgrade their capabilities. This paper contributes to this stream of research by providing an overarching framework that not only bridged previous narrower studies but also explained how firms can develop uncommoditizing strategies to upgrade their capabilities. Further, this paper helps managers by providing a comprehensive yet succinct overview of the main strategies that they can use to help their firms to achieve international competitiveness.

As the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), or the New Silk Road, as commonly known in Western countries, continues to grow in size and scope, some questions remain unanswered. Most skepticism arises about the primary purpose of the project, the contribution of members countries to the overall initiative, or the involvement of those territories that are neither touched by the land or the maritime side of the project. Latin America, for example, has significant interaction with China, but few countries may soon join the project. After taking a glance on the history of the Silk Road and the new project, we look at the current status of the BRI, and one of the main issues of concern which is the lack of homogenous contribution to the initiative. For that matter, we propose a much-needed adjustment to the BRI, using a new tool for evaluating the participation of member countries. Comparisons take into account the five collaboration variables established as the building blocks of the BRI: policy coordination, facilities connectivity, unimpeded trade, financial integration, and people-to-people bond. To make a more detailed analysis, we include two measurement criteria per variable, which can be used either to test for suitability of new or existing members of the New Silk Road. A second issue under study is the feasibility analysis of the extension of the initiative into Latin America. We use the proposed mechanism comparing 10 active members of the BRI versus 10 countries in Latin America. Results show the adequacy of the region to join the initiative. Indeed, we demonstrate that Latin America is suitable to be the East Wind of the BRI.

We present an analysis of the evolution of regulatory independence in practice for 23 Latin American and Caribbean countries in the telecommunications industry. Based on this analysis, we construct realistic indices of regulatory independence, which improve upon the measures of independence that have been used so far in the empirical regulation literature. We show that legal indices may give a partially distorted picture of the commitment ability of institutions. The combination of de facto and de jure independence has a positive (probably modest) impact on network penetration in telecommunications markets, although treating independence as exogenous may underestimate its impact.

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