Internationalization facilitates firms to achieve several potential benefits, however the internationalization process is accompanied by tremendous uncertainty and complexity on the firms’ operations. During past decades, several empirical findings show that there is no clear consensus about this ralationship. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to review the effect of internationalization on firm performance. In doing so, twenty-five related studies published in prestigious journals indexed the Web of Science – Clarivate Analytics and Scopus in the period of 1998-2019 are selected and reviewed. By applying the method of meta-analysis, most of the empirical studies show a positive effect of firms’ international expansion on their performance; while the nonlinear (U-shaped, or inverted U-shaped or S-shaped) relationship was confirmed by the others. Building upon these, this paper systematizes the limitations of previous studies and future research guidances are proposed to improve the robustness of future studies in the field.

Keywords: internationalization, performance, firms