Giorgio Barba Navaretti

Adjusting Labour Demand: Multinational vs. National Firms A Cross-European Analysis

This paper provides a cross-country perspective to the firm-level analysis of the relation between foreign ownership and labour demand. We estimate labour demand equations in eleven European countries using dynamic panel data techniques on samples that permit to distinguish the ownership status of firms. We find that the employment adjustment is significantly faster in MNEs’ affiliates, irrespective of the country investigated. As for the wage elasticity of labour demand, MNEs show smaller elasticities compared with national firms, and very little variation across countries. Crosscountry correlations show that the relative value of wage elasticities in MNEs on that in NEs is positively related to country-level indexes of labour market regulation (employment protection, union presence,...). We interpret the results as follows. MNEs tend to have a more rigid demand for total labour (possibly due to a different skill composition). However, being MNEs relatively “footloose”, this difference tends to vanish as the rigidity of employment regulations rises.

Technology and enterprise development : Ghana under structural adjustment

Technology is one of the primary determinants of the competitiveness of manufacturing firms. Since practically all the technologies in use are imported from the developed countries and their application is known and understood, it is widely believed that developing country firms need to invest little on their own in technological effort. This book is the first detailed attempt to assess technological capabilities in an African country. It is a study of a sample of manufacturing enterprises in Ghana. A country undergoing structural adjustment since the mid-1980s. It develops further and applies the methodology used in past analyses of technological capabilities in developing countries. Its findings cast fresh light on the problems of industrial development in Africa and on the effects of rapid liberalization programs. The policy conclusions drawn are of relevance to other countries at early stages of industrial development. This study was part of the World Banks Regional Program for Enterprise Development (RPED), which was intended to analyses the dynamics of enterprise growth in several countries in Sub Saharan Africa Ghana is the first country to be studied in this program. This study does not; therefore attempt to address the issues covered by these other modules. The enterprises in Ghana that gave generously of their time and information are too numerous to mention individually.

How Does Investing in Cheap Labour Countries Affect Performance at Home? France and Italy

Transferring low tech manufacturing jobs to cheap labour countries is often seen by part of the general public and policy makers as a step into the de-industrialisation of the European economies. However, several recent contributions have shown that the effects on home economies are rarely negative and often positive. Our paper contributes to this literature by examining how outward investments to cheap labour countries affect home activities of a sample of French and Italian firms that turn multinational in the period analysed. The effects of these investments are also compared to the effects of outward investments to developed economies. The analysis is carried out by using propensity score matching in order to build an appropriate counterfactual of national firms. This provides the hypothetical benchmark of what would have happened to domestic activities if firms had not invested abroad. We find no evidence of a negative effect of outward investments to cheap labour countries. In Italy they enhance the efficiency of home activities, with also positive long term effect on output and employment. For France we find a positive effect on the size of domestic activity. Investments to developed economies from both countries have essentially scale effects which eventually trickle down on employment and productivity at home.

Weightless Machines and Costless Knowledge: An Empirical Analysis of Trade and Technology Diffusion

The authors examine the impact on productivity of technologies imported by a sample of developing, and transition economies in Central and Easter Europe, and the Southern Mediterranean - economies becoming increasingly integrated with the European Union. They depart from earlier studies of technology diffusion by focusing on the technology embodied in the machines imported. Earlier work focused mostly on spillovers from foreign research, and development conveyed through trade, without controlling for the characteristics of the goods imported. The authors jointly estimate the choice of foreign technology, and its impact on domestic productivity for a set of manufacturing sectors. They proxy the technological level of the machines imported, by using an index relating the unit value of the machines imported by a given country, to the unit value of similar machines imported by the United States. At any point in time between 1989 and 1997, there is a persistent (even increasing) gap between the unit values of the machines imported by the United States, and those imported by the sample of developing countries. Although developing economies buy increasingly productive machines, the technology embodied in the machines persistently lags behind that in the machines purchased by the United States - so far as unit values are good proxies of embodied technologies. The authors also find that productivity growth in manufacturing, depends on the types of machines imported in a given industry. So although the optimal choice for developing countries is to buy cheaper, less sophisticated machines, given local skills and factor prices, this choice has a cost in long-run productivity growth. If productivity is low, countries buy low-technology machines, but doing so keeps them in a low-technology, low-growth trap.

When Vintage Technology Makes Sense: Matching Imports to Skills

Trade policies in many developing countries discriminate--through import bans, licensing requirements, or higher tariff rates. Even Australia adds a

The role of subsidies in promoting italian joint ventures in least developed and transition economies

12,000 tariff on used cars. Such discrimination is often motivated by the desire to protect domestic industries from competition from low-priced goods, to avoid becoming a dumping ground for castoffs from high-income countries,or to push domestic industries toward the technological frontier. But trade restrictions on used capital goods may be inappropriate in countries where low wages and high interest rates call for labor-intensive production processes. Older equipment is likely to be more labor-intensive than new equipment because technological changes tend to be labor-saving and older equipment requires greater maintenance and presents greater risk of machine downtime. In this empirical analysis of international trade in production machinery, the authors examine choices between new and used equipment, when there is labor-saving technical progress and the skills and technology available in a firm complement each other. They examine US exports of metalworking machine tools by country of destination, classifying machines by vintage technological characteristics. They do so by developing a new method for classifying trade data on machines according to the minimum technological skills necessary to operate them. They are consequently able to use trade data to measure technology transfer. The main findings: 1) The lower a countrys level of development--as measured by such indicators as per capita income, wages, and average education--the greater the share of used equipment imported by the country. 2) Imports of used machinery are greater, the faster the technical change and the greater the skills required to run the machinery efficiently. They conclude that technological factors and skill constraints may be far more important than wage and interest-rate differentials in determining a firms choice of technique in developing countries. Consequently the technological gap between advanced and developing economies rises when machines embody faster technological progress. The authors argue against constraints on imports of used equipment, not for the reason often given in existing literature--inappropriate capital-labor ratios in low-wage countries--but because investing in advanced technologies makes sense only if the countries importing them have the skill to use them.

Production and Transmission of Knowledge: Institutions and Economic Incentives. An Introduction

This paper analyses the impact of subsidies for the promotion of Italian joint ventures (JVs) aimed at LDCs and transition economies. The empirical analysis is carried out on a unique dataset of 172 JVs interviewed during 1998 by means of a closed-answer qualitative-quantitative questionnaire. The main finding of the study is that, although there is a significant deadweight component in incentive policy, the subsidized firms are significantly more likely to grow. Moreover, the JVs comprising new firms (which need to grow to survive) also have a higher employment performance than average, as do the (labour intensive) JVs motivated by the search for lower labour costs, and the JVs in east European countries.

Are Firms Exporting to China and India Different from Other Exporters

Is knowledge an economic good? Which are the characteristics of the institutions regulating the production, the transfer and the difffusion of knowledge? This volume adopts a multidisciplinary approach to bring knowledge at the forefront, as a key economic issue.

Moving Skills from Hands to Heads: Import of Technology and Export Performance

This chapter asks if and why advanced countries differ in their ability to export to China and India. To this end we exploit a newly collected, comparable cross-country dataset (EFIGE) obtained from a survey of 15,000 manufacturing firms in Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom. The EFIGE dataset contains detailed information on firms international activities as well as firm characteristics such as size and productivity, governance and management structure, workforce, innovation and research activity. We study both the extensive and intensive margins of exports and identify firm characteristics that are positively or negatively correlated with exporting activity tout court and with exporting to China and India conditional on being an exporter. We confirm previous rich evidence and show that larger, more productive, and more innovative firms are more likely to become exporters and export more. We also provide some new evidence on the role of governance and management: while there does not seem to be a strong negative effect of family ownership, we find that a higher percentage of family management reduces a firms export propensity and export volumes. When we turn to exports to China and India, we find that firms exporting there must be on average larger, more productive, and more innovative than firms exporting elsewhere.

Do Not Get Trapped into Crossing: Indian Firms and Foreign Markets

This paper examines the link between imported technologies and a country’s export performance, as measured by product quality. The analysis is set against the background of the process of regional integration between the EU and its neighbouring developing countries. The underlying question is whether trade integration fosters or dampens learning and technological upgrading. We find that unit values of exports from these countries to the EU rose steadily between 1988 and 1996, relative to the unit values of world exports to Europe. If increases in unit values satisfactorily proxy increases in product quality, then trade integration has fostered product upgrading and technological learning in the sample countries. We find that imported technologies and other sources of knowledge have a strong bearing on this pattern. Technological inflows are captured by the degree of involvement of European companies in export flows from our sample countries (Outward Processing Trade) and by the skill content of the machines imported.