The 2020 edition of the Emerging Market Multinationals Reports at the Emerging Markets Institute in Cornell University closes a five-year cycle. Authored by Lourdes Casanova and Anne Miroux, the Report aimed at contributing to a better understanding of firms from emerging markets and their home economies. This year, the Report looks back at the past decade, stressing how profoundly it transformed emerging markets. With growing economies and playing an increasing role in world trade and investment while emerging as key actors in global innovation and technology, they have consolidated their position in world affairs. The rise of emerging market multinationals, at the center of the Report since its inception, is a vivid illustration of their increasing clout in the global economy. The 2020 report thus reviews some of the corporate characteristics of emerging market multinationals and how they evolved over time. Based on a wealth of quantitative information and illustrative case studies, it highlights the remarkable headways of these enterprises in global business, and their contribution to the changing global innovation and technology landscape. With the COVID crisis, 2020 is also a year of rupture and the Report explores some of the consequences of this crisis for emerging markets and the global economy.

As this year the Emerging Markets Institute celebrates its 10th Anniversary, this 5th Report has been privileged to receive contributions from several of our partners: the EMnet at the OECD Development Center, World Bank’s IFC, Division of Investment and Entrepreneurship at UNCTAD, members of the Emerging Market Research Network, Wuhan University and of EMI Advisory faculty Board and Advisory Council, among others.