Multinational Enterprises and Host Country Development

The following sections are included:

• About the Authors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• Introduction

This study decomposes the productivity advantage of foreign multinationals into a technology and a scale effect and analyses the causal relationship between foreign ownership and these two components. This is done by analyzing the effects of an acquisition of a domestic establishment by a foreign multinational, using a combined propensity score matching and difference-in-differences estimation. The main results show that any positive impact of acquisition is predominantly due to changes in technical efficiency and not in scale and that the preacquisition productivity of the target plays a role in mediating the rate of technology transfer from the multinational.

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.

While foreign-owned firms have consistently been found to pay higher wages than domestic firms to what appear to be equally productive workers, the causes of this remain unresolved. In a two-period bargaining framework we show that if training is more productive and specific in foreign firms, foreign firm workers will have a steeper wage profile and thus acquire a premium over time. Using a rich employer-employee matched data set we verify that the foreign wage premium is only acquired by workers over time spent in the firm and only by those that receive on-the-job training, thus providing empirical support for a firmspecific human capital acquisition explanation.

Our aim in this paper is to evaluate the causal effect of foreign acquisition on research and development (R&D) intensity in targeted domestic firms. We are able to distinguish domestic multinational enterprises (MNEs) and non-MNEs, which allows us to investigate the fear that the change in ownership of domestic MNEs to foreign MNEs leads to a reduction in R&D activity in the country. Overall, our results give no support to the fears that foreign acquisition of domestic firms leads to a relocation of R&D activity in Swedish MNEs. Rather, in this paper, we find robust evidence that foreign acquisitions lead to increasing R&D intensity in acquired domestic MNEs and non-MNEs.

A recent, comprehensive database is used to investigate the link between inward foreign direct investment (FDI) and innovation activity in China. The results of the analysis suggest that private and collectively owned firms with foreign capital participation and those with good access to domestic bank loans innovate more than other firms do. Among enterprises not owned by the state, inward FDI at the sectoral level is positively associated with domestic innovative activity only among firms that engage in their own research and development or that have good access to domestic finance. At the sector level the effect of inward FDI into technology transfer is distinguished from the effect on domestic credit opportunities. FDI affecting credit is of little significance for state-owned enterprises and is independent of their access to finance. In contrast, better access to credit is an important channel through which FDI affects the innovation of domestic private and collectively owned enterprises.

We examine whether multinational companies are more footloose than their domestic counterparts in the host country, using data for the Irish manufacturing sector. First, we investigate whether plant survival rates differ between multinationals and indigenous plants. Second, we analyse whether employment is more unstable in multinationals. As regards the first aspect we find that multinationals are more likely to exit the market than indigenous plants when we control for other plant- and industryspecific characteristics. In terms of employment persistence we find that new jobs generated in multinational companies appear to be more persistent than jobs generated in indigenous plants. In contrast, they are not any more or less likely to reverse employment reductions, all other things being equal.

This paper analyzes the effect of foreign acquisition on survival and employment growth of targets using data on Swedish manufacturing plants. We separate targeted plants into those within Swedish MNEs, Swedish exporting non-MNEs, and purely domestic firms. The results, controlling for possible endogeneity of acquisition using IV and propensity score matching approaches suggest that acquisition by foreign owners increases the lifetime of the acquired plants only if the plant was an exporter. The effect is robust to controlling for domestic acquisitions and differs between horizontal and vertical acquisitions. We find robust positive employment growth effects only for exporters and only if the takeover is vertical.

This paper presents a meta-analysis of the literature on multinational companies and productivity spillovers. By collecting information from a sample of published and unpubluhed papers on the impact of multinational presence on domestic productivity, we investigate whether certain aspects of the study design affect the results, and whether there is publication bias in the literature. Our findings show that some aspects of the empirical methods used, namely, how the presence of multinationals is defined, and whether cross-oection or panel analysis is employed, may have an effect on the results. We also discover some evidence that there may be publication bias.

Governments the world over offer significant inducements to attract investment, motivated by the expectation of spillover benefits to augment the primary benefits of a boost to national income from new investment. There are several possible sources of induced spillovers from foreign direct investment. This article evaluates the empirical evidence on productivity, wage, and export spillovers in developing, developed, and transition economies. Although theory can identify a range of possible spillover channels, robust empirical support for positive spillovers is at best mixed. The article explores the reasons and concludes with a review of policy aspects…

Governments the world over offer significant inducements to attract investment, motivated by the expectation of spillover benefits to augment the primary benefits of a boost to national income from new investment. There are several possible sources of induced spillovers from foreign direct investment. This article evaluates the empirical evidence on productivity, wage, and export spillovers in developing, developed, and transition economies. Although theory can identify a range of possible spillover channels, robust empirical support for positive spillovers is at best mixed. The article explores the reasons and concludes with a review of policy aspects.

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.

We implement a method to estimate the direct effects of foreign-ownership on foreign firms’ productivity and the indirect effects (or spillovers) from the presence of foreign-owned firms on other foreign and domestic firms’ productivity in a unifying framework, taking interactions between firms into account. To do so,we relax a fundamental assumption made in empirical studies examining a direct casual effect of foreign ownership on firm productivity, namely that of no interactions between firms. Based on our approach, we have able to combine direct and indirect effects of foreign ownership and calculate the total effect of foreign firms on local productivity. Our results show that all these effects vary with the level of foreign presence within a cluster, an important findIng for the academic literature and policy debate on the benefits of attracting foreign owned firms.

While there is a large empirical literature on productivity spillovers from multinationals, this literature treats the channels through which these spillover effects work as a black box. The new approach in this paper is to investigate whether spillovers occur via worker mobility. We use data on whether or not the owner of a domestic firm has previous experience in a multinational, and relate this information to firm-level productivity. Our results suggest that firms which are run by owners who worked for multinationals in the same industry immediately prior to opening up their own firm are more productive than other domestic firms.

We investigate whether government subsidies encourage foreign multinationals to create linkages with domestic suppliers. To this end we usc a unique panel dataset of foreign multinationals located in Ireland for which we have exhaustive information on grant receipt. Our results indicate that while European and US foreign plants develop backward linkages independently of grant receipt, multinationals from other parts of the world respond positively to government support. Our results hold even when controUing for the possible endogeneity of grants and the boundedness of the linkage variable. We conclude that governments should not apply a “one-size-fits-all” approach to incentivizing foreign multinationals.

Using Information on more than 1000 firms in a number of emerging countries, we find quantitative evidence that suppliers of multinationals that are pressured by their customers to reduce production costs or develop new products have higher productivity growth than other firms, including other host country suppliers of multinationals. These findings provide first emplrical support for a “forced llnbge effect” from supplying multinational companies. Our findings hold controlling for other factors within and outside the supplier-customer relationship and when endogeneity concerns are taken Into consideration.

How does the presence of multinational companies affect plant swvival in the host country? We postulate that multinational companies can impact positively on plant swvival through technology spillovers. We examine the nature of the effect of multinationals using a Cox proportional hazard model, which we estimate using plant-level data for Irish manufacturing industries. Our results show that the presence of multinationals has a life-enhancing effect only on indigenous plants in high-tech industries, suggesting the presence of technology spillovers. In contrast, multinationals compete with each other in low-tech sectors in the host country.

This paper presents an empirical study of the effect of foreign multinational companies on the development of indigenous firms in the host country. Our starting point is a recent paper by Markusen and Venables (European Economic Review 43 (1999) 335–356) that shows formally that multinationals, through the creation of linkages with indigenous suppliers, can exert positive effects on the development of indigenous firms. Based on the literature on entry in industrial organisation, we estimate empirically a model describing the entry of indigenous firms using data for the Irish manufacturing sector. Our results indicate that there is a positive effect of multinational companies on the entry of indigenous firms for a variety of alternative specifications.

This paper analyses the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on the development of local firms. We focus on two likely effects of FDI: A competition effect which deters entry of domestic firms and positive market externalities which foster the development of local industry. Using a simple theoretical model to illustrate how these forces work we show that the number of domestic firms follows a u-shaped curve, where the competition effect first dominates but is gradually outweighed by positive externalities. Evidence for Ireland tends to support this result. Specifically, applying semi-parametric regression techniques on plant level panel data for the manufacturing sector we find that while the competition effect may have initially deterred local firms’ entry, this initial effect has been outpaced by positive externalities making the overall impact of FDI largely positive for the domestic industry.