Understanding firms' international growth: A proposal via self organizing maps

Abstract

We discuss the use of Self Organizing Maps (SOMs) to address an issue the recently gained increasing relevance among economics scholars, i.e. how to measure firms level of international growth. We will demonstrate that SOMs can be a very powerful technique with superior features with respect to more traditional techniques (namely: K-means clustering). Our arguments will be supported by the empirical evidence, as we investigated the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) database. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.