Externalities from Foreign Direct Investment: The Sectoral Pattern of Spillovers and Linkages* Maurice Kugler Department of Economics University of Southampton Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK Abstract This paper contributes an estimation framework to measure both technological and linkage externalities from foreign direct investment (FDI). Empirical research to date has dealt only with intra-industry spillovers from FDI without allowance for inter-industry effects. However, as optimal organization of the multinational corporation (MNC) involves minimization of profit losses due to leakage of technical information to competitors, host-country firms within the MNC’s sector experience limited productivity gains ensuing FDI. Other producers may benefit, especially when MNCs transfer knowledge to local clients, or outsource to local upstream suppliers. FDI substitutes within-sector domestic investment but complements it across sectors. Hence, FDI can potentially induce not only exit and entry but also changes in incumbents’ market shares across industries. The net impact on aggregate capital formation by host-country producers hinges on the interaction between linkages and spillovers. Estimations based on the Colombian Manufacturing Census yield the sectoral pattern of externality diffusion and measurement of spillover and linkage effects from FDI.
Keywords: Foreign direct investment, generic technology; inter-industry spillovers; absorptive capacity. JEL Codes: O41, F43, F21, F23, C52.
*
I thank Pranab Bardhan, Antonio Ciccone, Brad DeLong, José Gonzalez, Nick Hope, Boyan Jovanovic, Adriana Kugler, Franco Malerba, Howard Pack, Paul Romer, Tom Rothenberg, Pablo Spiller, T.N. Srinivasan, Jim Tybout, Juuso Valimaki and Tony Venables for very useful comments. The Central Bank of Colombia provided assistance in assembling the FDI data. I enjoyed the hospitality while being a consultant at the Colombian Bureau of Statistics, and a visting scholar at the Center for Research on Economic Development and Policy Reform in Stanford University. Please address correspondence to: mdk1@soton.ac.uk.