Disasters and International Business: Insights and Reommendations from a Systematic Review

While the COVID-19 pandemic revived the academic interest for disasters, little effort has been made to consolidate the fragmented research on disaster in the field of international business (IB). Yet, in the current global environment, we speculate that this international perspective to examine disasters of all forms (climate change, terrorism, pandemics) is likely to grow in the near future. Therefore, it appears crucial and urgent to consolidate the existing knowledge to provide a solid basis to future research. Guided by Werner’s framework, we systematically review 88 articles published between 1978 and 2020 and evaluates the nascent but rapidly growing literature at the intersection of disasters and IB. In critically analyzing this body of work, we reveal a number of areas that warrant further attention for scholars who wish to enhance academic understanding of the role of disasters in within the field of IB.