The impact of digitization on the international expansion of firms: a literature review analysis

The digital transformation of companies impacts internationalization is why this article is born with the purpose of providing a systematic review of existing research, analyzing the literature related to key aspects of digital transformation at particular, business and macroeconomic levels. They also demonstrated empirically that information technology systems (ICT) can reduce transaction costs in terms of communication and external coordination between supply chain partners. On the other hand, they proposed that ICT adoption influences foreign border decisions by reducing coordination costs both internally and externally for the firm. This manuscript provides a review of the existing literature to identify the central issues surrounding the positive and negative impacts of digital transformation on the internationalization process of firms. The paper also evaluated the theories and significant variables that explain the growth of e-commerce companies and their internationalization, finding a link in which transaction costs and resource-based perspectives complement each other. The methodology employed was a literature review that identified the most relevant articles in the last five years (2019-2024). The articles were extracted from Scopus. Finally, although most of the existing studies have analyzed a positive impact of digitalization on the internationalization process of companies, only a few studies have mentioned its negative effects on international business.