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The threshold regression framework is used to examine the effect of foreign direct investment on growth in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The growth literature is awash with divergent evidence on the role of foreign direct investment (FDI) on economic growth. Although the FDI–growth nexus has been studied in diverse ways, very few studies have examined the relationship within the framework of threshold analysis. Furthermore, even where this framework has been adopted, none of the previous studies has comprehensively examined the FDI–growth nexus in the broader SSA. In this paper, within the standard panel and threshold regression framework, the problem of determining the growth impact of FDI is revisited.

Six variables are used as thresholds – inflation, initial income, population growth, trade openness, financial market development and human capital, and the analysis is based on a large panel data set that comprises 45 SSA countries for the years 1985–2013.

The results of this study show that the direct impact of FDI on growth is largely ambiguous and inconsistent. However, under the threshold analysis, it is evident that FDI accelerates economic growth when SSA countries have achieved certain threshold levels of inflation, population growth and financial markets development. This evidence is largely invariant qualitatively and is robust to different empirical specifications. FDI enhances growth in SSA when inflation and private sector credit are below their threshold levels while human capital and population growth are above their threshold levels.

The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, the paper streamlines the threshold analysis of FDI–growth nexus to focus on countries in SSA – previous studies on FDI-growth nexus in SSA are country-specific and time series–based (see Tshepo, 2014; Raheem and Oyınlola, 2013 and Bende-Nabende, 2002). This paper provides a panel analysis and considers a broader set of up to 45 SSA countries. Such a broad set of SSA countries had never been considered in the literature. Second, the paper expands on available threshold variables to include two new important macroeconomic variables, population growth and inflation which, though are important absorptive capacities but, until now, had not been used as thresholds in the FDI–growth literature. The rationale for including these variables as thresholds stems from the evidence of an empirical relationship between population growth and economic growth, see Darrat and Al-Yousif (1999), and between inflation and economic growth, see Kremer et al. (2013).

Among the prominent economic trends in recent decades is the exponential increase in flows of goods and capital driven by technological progress and falling of restrictions. A key driver of this phenomenon has been the cross-border production, foreign investment, and trade both final and intermediate goods by multinational corporations. Research has sought to understand how foreign direct investment (FDI) affects host economies. This paper reviews the main theories and empirical evidence of two streams of literature: the mechanisms by which multinational activity might create positive effects and externalities to countries and the role of complementary local conditions, also known as “absorptive capacities,” that allow a country to reap the benefits of FDI paying particular attention to the role of factor markets, reallocation effects, and the linkages generated between foreign and domestic firms. The survey focuses mainly on work related to developing countries.

Whether foreign direct investment (FDI) can promote technology progress in the host country, or not, has become an issue in recent decades. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of FDI on regional technological capabilities.

This paper first analyzes the spillover effects of FDI with reference to actual conditions in foreign‐funded enterprises in China, then uses correlation analysis and regression analysis to show the impact of FDI on technological capabilities. This paper compares the R&D expenditures in foreign‐funded enterprises and FDI origin countries between three typical regions – Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Guangdong – to show the influencing factors of spillovers.

The impact of FDI on regional technological capabilities is found to be weak; FDI has little use for enhancing indigenous innovation capability. The regions with higher technological capabilities will attract the higher quality of inward FDI, and the powerful technological capabilities and abundant human capitals in domestic enterprises are essential factors to stimulate the spillover effects of FDI.

The arguments could be discussed more fully if an empirical model could be established to disclose the determinants of spillover effects. How to measure the spillover effects quantitatively is a key problem for future research.

This paper discloses the mutual relationship between domestic and foreign‐funded enterprises. The findings in this paper provide some insights for both the host countries and the foreign investors.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the relative importance of deliberate learning, learning from experience and relevant learning co-variates in pursuing market learning, and to assess the impact of market learning on export performance in smaller firms.

A theoretical model was initially developed and subsequently tested using survey data. The standard two step approach of first testing the measurement model and then estimating the structural model was adopted.

The results provide concrete evidence that among SMEs, deliberate learning has a greater impact on export market learning as compared to experience accumulation, and that market learning has a significant effect on export performance. The results also show that absorptive capacity and commitment to learning are significant co-variates of market learning.

This paper focuses on the role of deliberate learning vis-a-vis learning by experience in achieving foreign market learning and export performance in smaller firms. It addresses a major limitation of organisational learning studies which tend to focus mainly on experiential learning and organisational learning in large organisations.

This paper explains the mechanisms underlying the generation of two-way knowledge spillovers through the interaction of subsidiaries with differentiated local responsibilities and domestic firms.

The study is based on firm-level panel data from a census of Colombian manufacturing firms for the period 2003–2012. The estimation procedure involves two stages. In the first one, total factor productivity (TFP) of foreign and domestic firms is estimated. In a second step, we estimate conventional spillovers (from foreign-owned to local firms) and reverse spillovers (from local to foreign-owned firms) separately, using a random effect approach.

This study’s findings reveal that only locally creative subsidiaries enjoy positive and significant two-way knowledge spillover effects. The connectivity of subsidiaries to local and international networks is reinforced by reciprocal relationships among actors that enhance bidirectional knowledge flows, these being favored by the dynamics of clustering effects.

The paper contributes with new empirical evidence about the mechanism explaining how the technological heterogeneity of subsidiaries plays a determinant role in the generation of both knowledge flows from foreign to domestic firms and to the reverse, all integrated into the same framework.

In the literature concerning international new ventures (INVs), there has been a tension between the learning advantages of newness and absorptive capacity perspectives for explaining the performance influence of initial entry speed. To address this tension, this paper, through integrating both the motivation and ability to acquire foreign knowledge, proposes a theoretical model about the nonlinear relationship between INVs’ initial entry speed and international performance. Drawing upon upper echelons theory and the institution-based view, this study aims to extend the literature by developing two boundary conditions for this relationship: the moderating role of executives’ individual learning orientation and sub-national institutions.

The authors used the latent moderated structural equations approach specific to Mplus to test the hypotheses with data on 322 Chinese INVs.

The findings indicate that INVs’ international performance will increase initially and then decrease, as they accelerate initial entry speed (an inverted U-shaped relationship), and that INVs managed by executives with a higher learning orientation and located in better sub-national institutional environments achieve greater international growth gains from moderate initial entry speed.

This study mainly makes contributions to the INV literature by integrating the motivation and ability to acquire foreign knowledge to offer full understanding of the effect of initial entry speed on international performance, and by elaborating on the moderating effects of executives’ individual learning orientation and sub-national institutions on this relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role that collaborations, both foreign and domestic, play on product innovation, sales mix, and sales revenue for Chinese firms. Both statistical correlations and marginal (economic) effects of collaborations feature in the analysis.

This study includes 2,700 Chinese firms across 15 industry sectors and 25 cities from a World Bank survey conducted in 2012; the data are stratified by firm size. Given the different types of dependent variables to be estimated, several methodologies are employed: logistic regression, Poisson regression, and ordinary least squares. The marginal effects of key variables are then calculated to demonstrate their economic impact.

Regarding the likelihood of product innovation, collaboration with domestic (Chinese) companies is significant for Chinese micro, medium, and large enterprises. Being a foreign subsidiary is significant for the proportion of new products in the sales mix for small, medium, and large firms. Domestic collaboration can boost the sales of innovating small firms and innovating medium companies by nearly 113 and 140 percent, respectively.

This study builds on the current literature by examining the impact of foreign vs domestic collaboration on Chinese firms, whereas most research examines foreign players only. It offers a more nuanced analysis by stratifying estimates according to firm size, and it goes beyond statistical significance to quantify the real economic effect of collaborations on Chinese companies.

The choice of an investment location by a multinational enterprise (MNE) is determined not only by firm‐specific variables that define the motive of foreign direct investment (FDI), but is also determined by variables that define locational aspects. The purpose of this paper is to report on the study of the constituents of production and logistics environment of a host country and its effect on FDI decisions of MNEs. The concept is introduced of supply chain capability (SCC) of countries, a long‐run variable based on the production and logistics environment, as shaping the FDI of MNEs.

The research uses regression analyses on secondary data to test the research hypotheses.

The analysis substantiates the basic proposition of SCC of a country being a determinant of FDI, and that its effect varies with the size of the host country's economy. Further, the study suggests a differential impact of SCC on developing and developed countries. The study also confirms that SCC is a determinant of vertical and export‐platform FDI but not of horizontal FDI.

The study has limitations, in that the unit of analysis is a country. Countries, however, are not homogeneous in their SCC. Thus, regional differences or sectoral differences have not been taken into account.

By providing a holistic view, SCC helps MNEs in taking a more integrated view of a location's attractiveness. The study also has relevance and prescriptive value, especially for small developing countries which are seeking to improve their attractiveness as a FDI destination.

This paper seeks to explore the factors behind the slow growth of economies with abundant oil and gas resources, despite the opportunities these resources potentially represent.

The building blocks of standard economic growth models and the implication of natural resource utilisation is the methodological and analytical approach adopted. A qualitative analysis of the impact of oil and gas activities on the growth of the Nigerian economy is carried out using relevant macroeconomic indicators.

The oil and gas sector is imbued with enormous linkage potentials that can stimulate other sectors to generate endogenous growth. Emphasis on the extraction and export of oil and gas subverts technological progress, stifles the revenue earning potential of the economy and stultifies the effectiveness of factors of production, thereby retarding economic growth.

Data on technological input into oil and gas activities could not be obtained, but the changing pattern of productive capacity, especially in the downstream sub‐sector, is used as a measure of technological change.

Oil‐ and gas‐abundant economies can exploit potential comparative advantage by creating favourable conditions in value‐adding oil and gas activities. Through spill‐over effects a wide range of economic activities evolves, with concomitant market expansions. Positive externalities for learning‐by‐doing arising from this process can lead to endogenous technological progress to drive sustainable economic growth.

The findings show that rather than reliance on foreign exchange revenues from oil and gas, creating the appropriate conditions for the effective domestic utilisation of oil and gas resources to bolster inter‐sectoral linkages is a more virile strategy for oil‐and‐gas driven economic growth.

This study aims to investigate whether the absorptive capacity, learning intent of the recipient, the attractiveness of the knowledge source and the relationship quality between the recipient and the source in high-technology sectors in emerging markets influences the nature of the intra-organizational knowledge being transferred.

A total of 180 completed survey responses from all cellular network providers operating in Pakistan were analyzed. This study uses multiple regression analysis to empirically tests the above relationships using data from the cellular network sector in Pakistan.

The findings highlight how the highly educated workforce and the motivation to learn has an impact on the effective cross-border sharing of knowledge, both technological and marketing knowledge.

This study is one of the few to test the factors that influence the effective and efficient transfer of knowledge from developed to emerging markets.