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An Overview of Biopharma Industry in China – Featuring Mr. Ling Zhen, Head of Greater China, Quintiles.

L'Oréal Singapore Awards 2015 For Women In Science National Fellowships.

The intention of this paper is to give an overview on the issue of technology exploitation within the context of globalization. Multinational companies which have extended business to the global market have more options regarding utilization of their technologies, thus having greater motivation and more chances for development. However, the global context also complicates technology exploitation. In this paper, we first address what technology exploitation means and the patterns of technology exploitation for multinational companies. Then, the benefits and risks of internationally exploiting technologies are discussed. Next, we shed light on some factors influencing the decision on technology exploitation patterns. Moreover, conceptual models helping firms’ option on technology exploitation pattern from perspectives of cost effectiveness and risk aversion are presented. By focusing on the technology exploitation patterns in the global market, this study holds several implications for the multinational companies to manage their efforts on realization of commercial value of technologies.

This paper questions the nature of the foreign direct R&D investments in Central Europe. Do the affiliates of the multinationals still undertake adaptive R&D? Have they recently engaged in innovative R&D activities in their Central European affiliates? Because patents result from the firm's investments in basic research and applied development, we consider patent data as a good proxy of the firm's genuine inventive activity. We build a sample made of the 10 multinationals representing the most active R&D investors in the Czech Republic — the Central European leader as regards of foreign direct R&D investments — and in the major foreign direct R&D sectors — electronics, electrical equipment, machinery and motor vehicles — and assess the recent evolution of their patenting activity. We suggest that (a) even these major R&D investors still only marginally apply for patents in their Czech affiliates; (b) there is no under-evaluation of the innovation activity of the Czech affiliates due to a geographical separation of inventions — in the Czech Republic — and patent location — in Western Europe; (c) the researchers working in the Czech affiliates are still not sufficiently oriented towards innovation activities to be integrated in the patenting-oriented international teams built by the multinationals. Foreign direct R&D investments in Central Europe remain mostly production supportive and associated with the international exploitation of technology produced in the Western headquarters and affiliates. Despite the strong engagement of the Czech government towards foreign direct R&D, real innovative R&D increases very slowly.

Management practices are important drivers of firm productivity (Bloom et al., 2019). While differences in the formalisation and sophistication of management practices are evident in comparisons of foreign multinationals and domestic firms (Bloom et al., 2012, Bloom and Van Reenen, 2007a, Bloom and Van Reenen, 2010), a striking omission from many studies is the failure to distinguish between domestic firms and domestically-owned multinationals (McDonnell et al., 2014). We merge the World Management Survey with the FAME dataset to examine the influence of firm ownership (standalone domestic firms; domestic groups; domestic owned multinationals; foreign owned multinationals) across a broad range of management practices. Foreign owned multinationals exhibit the highest formalisation and sophistication of management practices compared to all other firm types. However, significant asymmetries exist between different management practices across firm ownership. This is important as it raises questions as to whether there is sufficient learning and transfer of practices taking place across firms.

Over the last 20 years the U.S. economy has experienced a strong reduction in the volatility of GDP growth. This paper documents and models the rapid growth of multinational corporations as a source of gradual decline in output and investment volatility. The paper introduces internationally diversified multinational firms into the financial accelerator framework; where international operations provide multinational firms with smoother paths of net worth that result in less volatile financing costs, investment and production. Model simulations suggest that larger multinational corporations can account for up to a 19 percent and 27 percent decline in output and investment volatility, respectively.

Activist organizations, interest groups, unions and media reveal information about labour standards. In a world where some consumers are not self-interested, the price of a product made by a multinational enterprise and the latter's location and production decisions depend on the difference in labour standards between developed and less developed countries. We study the effect of an increase in the fraction of informed inequity-averse consumers on the behaviour of multinational frms, on the equilibrium level of labour standards and on the welfare of workers in the less developed countries. An increase in activism deteriorates labour practices and decreases welfare.

A model is constructed in which multinational firms arise endogenously. Multinationals are more important in total activity when countries are similar in incomes (size) and in relative factor endowments, and when total world income is high. These predictions are consistent with empirical evidence, and our results help point to more formal tests. The standard oligopoly model of international trade is a special case of our model when multinationals are suppressed, and this allows us to provide an explicit comparison to the national-firm model with respect to the location of production, welfare, and the volume of trade.

We develop a monopolistic-competition model of international trade which includes positive trade costs and endogenous multinational firms. We demonstrate how the presence of trade costs changes the pattern of trade, creates incentives for factor mobility which may lead to agglomeration of activity in a single country, and may lead to multinational firms. The mix of national and multinational firms that operate in equilibrium depends on technology and on the division of the world endowment between countries. Multinationals are more likely to exist the more similar are countries in both relative and absolute endowments, a result consistent with empirical evidence. The presence of multinationals creates trade in headquarters’ services, alters the incentives for factor mobility, and reduces the tendencies towards agglomeration.

In this paper the authors develop an innovative 21 sector computable general equilibrium model of Armenia to assess the impact on Armenia of a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA) with the EU, as well as further regional or multilateral trade policy commitments. They find that a DCFT A with the EU will likely result in substantial gains to Armenia, but they show that the gains derive from the deep aspects of the agreement. In order of importance, the sources of the gains are: (i) trade facilitation and reduction in border costs; (ii) services liberalization; and (iii) standards harmonization. A shallow agreement with the EU that focuses only on preferential tariff liberalization in goods will likely lead to small losses to Armenia primarily due to a loss of productivity from lost varieties of technologies from the Rest of the World region in manufactured products. Additional gains can be expected in the long run from an improvement in the investment climate. The authors estimate only small gains from a services agreement with the CIS countries, but significant gains from expanding services liberalization multilaterally.

This paper seeks to identify the causal effect of foreign acquisitions on wages of skilled and unskilled workers, using difference-in-differences propensity score matching estimators. Our results suggest that there is substantial heterogeneity in the post-acquisition wage effect depending on the nationality of the foreign acquirer and the skill group of workers. We find sizable post acquisition wage effects on skilled and unskilled wages following an acquisition by a US finn. No such impacts result from acquisitions by EU multinationals. Also we discern some positive wage effects for unskilled workers resulting from acquisitions by multinationals from the rest of the world.

We argue that the measures of backward linkages wed in recent pages on spillovers from multinational companies are potentially problematic. as they depend on a number of restrictive assumptions. namely that (i) multinationals use domestically produced inputs in the same proportion as Imported Inputs, (ii) multinationals have the same input sourcing behaviour as domestic firms, Irrespective of their country of origin, and (iii) the demand for locally produced Inputs by multinationals is proportional to their share of locally produced output. We discuss why these assumptions are likely to be violated in practice, and provide alternative measures that overcome these drawbacks. Our results. using plant level data for Ireland, clearly show that the choice of backward linkage measure and thus. the assumptions behind it. matters greatly In order to draw possible conclusions regarding the existence of foreign direct investment (FDI)-related spillovers. Using the standard measure employed In the literature we fail to find robust evidence for spillovers through backward linkages. However, when we use alternative measures of backward linkages that relax assumptions (i)–(iii), we find robust evidence for positive FDI backward spillover effects.