A Literature Review of Headquarters Relocation

With the economic globalization and the imbalance of Chinese urban space development, the domestic enterprise groups have raised a wave of headquarters migration since 2000. The company headquarters relocated their core R&D departments and marketing departments inter-regionally for enterprises re-growth. To response to this wave, many regional governments have also actively developed headquarters economy in order to retain the local enterprises headquarters and attract foreign corporate headquarters. In this paper, we review and comment on the relevant theoretical study of the headquarters relocation from the value chain theory, regional development theory, industrial cluster theory and headquarters economy theory. We also summarize the results of behavioral research on the motivation, target location, performance evaluation of the headquarters relocation, and finally we get the problems of existing literature and the focus in future research.