Priit Vahter

Home versus Host Country Effects of FDI: Searching for New Evidence of Productivity Spillovers

This paper investigates the effects of both inward and outward foreign direct investment (FDI) on productivity in manufacturing and services sectors. The main novelty is the analysis of the spillover effects of outward FDI that may occur outside the investing firms on the rest of the home country. Our results based on panel data from Estonia do not indicate much spillover effects of outward or inward FDI that are robust to different specifications of the estimated model. There is substantial heterogeneity in the findings on spillovers across different specifications of the model or sector studied.

An Analysis of the Economic Convergence Process in the Transition Countries

The paper is analysing the process of economic convergence of transition countries during the period 1995–2004. Within the analysed period unconditional s-convergence across the transition economies existed. We could also discover the reduction of dispersion of income levels between accession countries (sigma-convergence). Comparative analyses of the new EU member states (NMS) economic convergence with the previous entrants into EU (Ireland, Greece, Spain, and Portugal) revealed that NMS have been much more successful in their convergence process before joining EU. Analyses of the macroeconomic, human capital, infrastructure indicators of the current accession countries compared with the previous cohesion countries indicated that the new members have been much better prepared to the enlargement. This allows drawing conclusion that the NMS face an opportunity to obtain much more rapid convergence process than expected by previous analyses, which have seriously undervalued the positive role of the pre-accession harmonisation process of NMS with the implementation of the major economic reforms in order to guarantee macroeconomic stability.

The Effect of Foreign Direct Investment on Labour Productivity: Evidence from Estonia and Slovenia

This paper studies the effects of foreign direct investment on labour productivity in manufacturing industries of two transition countries, Estonia and Slovenia. The emphasis is on the dimension of export/local market orientation. The study is based on firm-level panel data. It is shown that in Estonia the export oriented foreign investment enterprises have on average much lower labour productivity level than the domestic market oriented foreign affiliates. In Slovenia, on the contrary, the export orientation of a foreign affiliate is not correlated with lower labour productivity. No horizontal spillovers of foreign direct investment to domestic firms are detected in Estonia. In Slovenia, however, positive spillovers to domestic firms are found but there is no indication of spillovers to other foreign affiliates. The findings show that different types of foreign direct investment can have different effects on the host country and that the existence of positive spillovers may depend on the level of economic development of the host country.

The Effect of Outward Foreign Direct Investment on Home-Country Employment in a Low-Cost Transition Economy

The current extensive literature on the home-country employment effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) focuses almost exclusively on investments from high-income and high labor-cost home countries. Our paper analyzes the home-country employment effect in Estonia as a low-cost, medium-income transition economy. The data from the population of Estonian firms between 1995 and 2002 are studied with regression analysis and propensity score matching to construct an appropriate counterfactual for firms that have invested abroad. Our results imply that the logic of the outward investments from low-cost transition and developing economies differs from that of high-income countries. The results indicate that in general, outward FDI positively affects home-country employment growth. Direct investors (domestic firms investing abroad) have a stronger home-country employment effect than do indirect investors (foreign-owned firms investing abroad) due to their smaller preinvestment size and because the subsidiaries of indirect investors are served from other locations rather than from Estonia. The positive employment effect is much stronger for investments made after 1999 due to the better macroeconomic performance of Estonia from 2000 onward. Services firms demonstrate a stronger home-country employment effect than do manufacturing firms.

Exporting and Productivity: The Effects of Multi-Market and Multi-Product Export Entry

Most of the empirical studies on the micro-level effects of exporting on productivity pay little attention to the potentially heterogeneous effects of the different modes of export market entry. We study how productivity of firms is affected by export entry simultaneously into several markets or export entry with several export products, and compare these to the entry into fewer markets or the entry with fewer products. Our analysis is based on detailed export data from firms in Estonia, disaggregated for each firm by export markets and individual products. We show that the early stage entry into several export markets or with several products leads to higher growth in productivity, compared with entry into only one foreign market or with only one product. This implies significant benefits from experimentation with different markets and different products.

Does FDI Spur Innovation, Productivity and Knowledge Sourcing by Incumbent Firms? Evidence from Manufacturing Industry in Estonia

Does FDI affect productivity growth, innovation, and knowledge sourcing activities of domestic firms? This study employs detailed firm-level panel-data from Estonia’s manufacturing sector to investigate different channels through which FDI can affect domestic firms. I use instrumental variables approach to identify the effects. I find no evidence of an effect of FDI entry on local incumbents’ TFP and labour productivity growth in the short term. The effect on productivity does not depend on the local firms’ distance to the productivity frontier. However, there are positive spillovers on process innovation. The results show significant positive correlation between the entry of FDI in a sector and the more direct measures of spillovers in subsequent periods. This is consistent with the view that FDI inflow to a sector intensifies knowledge flows to domestic firms.

The Impact of Outward FDI on Home-Country Employment in a Low-Cost Transition Economy

The current extensive literature on the home-country employment effect of FDI focuses almost exclusively on the case of investments from high-income and high labour cost home countries. In our paper we analyse the home-country employment effect in Estonia as a lowcost medium-income transition economy. The data from the population of Estonian firms between 1995 and 2002 was studied with regression analysis and propensity score matching in order to construct an appropriate counterfactual for the firms that have invested abroad. The results indicate that in general, outward FDI had a positive impact on the home-country employment growth. Concerning direct investors (domestic firms investing abroad) and indirect investors (foreign-owned firms investing abroad), the former group had a stronger homecountry employment effect due to their smaller pre-investment size and because the subsidiaries of indirect investors are served from other locations rather than from Estonia. The positive employment effect was much stronger in the case of investments made after 1999 due to the better macro-economic performance of Estonia from the year 2000 onwards. Services firms demonstrated a stronger home-country employment effect than manufacturing firms. Our results imply that the logic of the outward investments from low-cost transition and developing economies differs from that of high-income countries.

Financial Constraints, Innovation Performance and Sectoral Disaggregation

How do the effects of financial constraints on innovation performance vary by sector and firm characteristics? This paper uses innovation survey data from 11 European countries to examine the heterogeneity of these effects. Our results suggest that the impact of direct measures of financial barriers differs in production and service sectors, and also by the firms export orientation. In particular, financial constraints appear to have more pronounced negative effects in the production sector than in the service sector. Among different types of firms, the response to financial constraints seems to be stronger for non-exporters.

Foreign Market Experience, Learning by Hiring and Firm Export Performance

Export experience of managers and other top specialists is among the key drivers of export decisions in firms. We show evidence of this regularity based on employer-employee level data from the manufacturing industry in Estonia. We find that hiring managers and other high-wage employees with prior experience in exporting to a specific geographical region is associated with a higher probability of export entry to that region. However, there is little evidence of significant effects on export intensity. Notably, the relationship between export experience and a firm’s export decisions is usually stronger if the prior export experience is from an exporter that is located nearby in the product space. Our findings suggest that the contribution of prior trade experience of employees and the firm’s productivity as drivers of export market entry are of comparable magnitude.

Gross Profit Taxation Versus Distributed Profit Taxation and Firm Performance: Effects of Estonia’s Corporate Income Tax Reform

Systems of profit taxation are undergoing continuous change and are subject to numerous studies. This paper estimates the effect of the corporate tax reform in Estonia in the year 2000, a reform that was unique anywhere. This reform nullified the taxation of retained earnings and retained the corporate income tax only on distributed profits. We estimate the effect of the reform on firms’ capital structure, liquidity, investments and productivity. The effect of the reform is identified by comparing the performance of Estonian firms that were affected with that of firms from Latvia and Lithuania, the two other Baltic states, which are economically fairly similar to Estonia and have correlated business cycles. We use firm-level financial data and the difference in differences and propensity score matching methods for our analysis. The results show that the corporate tax reform has resulted in increased holdings of liquid assets and lower use of debt financing; these results can be seen especially among the smaller companies affected by the liquidity constraints. These developments have contributed positively to firms’ survival during the recent global economic crisis. A positive effect on investment and labour productivity has also been found, especially among companies in the services sector. The results imply that distributed profit taxation schemes may have significant positive effects on economic development and firms’ survival.