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This paper aims to examine the relationship between foreign ownership and firm performance, using an approach which the authors show is more advanced than existing methods, and more aligned with accepted theory and conceptual frameworks developed in international business. The authors demonstrate that simply relying on a binary distinction between foreign and domestic firms ignores much of the information regarding the importance of ownership structure and is disconnected from the wider literature on ownership structure, motivations for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and performance.

The authors illustrate this by using a threshold estimation method to endogenously uncover the level of foreign ownership up to which the transfer of foreign firm advantage from the parent company to the affiliate is the strongest.

The results show that for Germany, Poland, Italy and the UK, there are significantly different thresholds of foreign ownership over the period, 2001-2010. Due to non-linearities and different thresholds, the authors argue that before one can entertain secondary considerations concerning foreign firm impact on host countries, one needs to apply the appropriate approach.

This is the first paper that uses an endogenous threshold approach on a large firm level data set to show that there are significant differences and non-linearities in the relationship between foreign ownership and productivity.

The extant literature on emerging market multinationals (EMNEs) suggest that they derive their advantages from factors such as economies of scale, and that they internationalise, in large measure, to access technology. However, support for this framework typically comes from analysis of static data, comparing EMNEs and OECD MNEs at a point in time. Little attention is paid to their development paths in a dynamic setting. We examine these propositions directly using an approach that enables us to decompose productivity growth of firms into its components, namely, changes in scale economies, technological progress and technical efficiency. We compare Chinese MNEs with their non-MNE domestic counterparts and developed country MNEs that have operations in China. We demonstrate that Chinese MNEs continue to derive much of their productivity growth from changes in scale economies, while developed country MNEs continue to have an advantage with respect to technical progress. Both these types of MNEs have a significant advantage over Chinese non-MNE domestic firms.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the importance of host country networks and organisation of production in the context of international technology transfer that accompanies foreign direct investment (FDI).

The empirical analysis is based on unbalanced panel data covering Japanese firms active in two-digit manufacturing sectors over a seven-year period. Given the self-selection problem affecting past sectoral-level studies, using firm-level panel data is a prerequisite to provide robust empirical evidence.

While Japan is thought of as being a technologically advanced country, the results show that vertical productivity spillovers from FDI occur in Japan, but they are sensitive to technological differences between domestic firms and the idiosyncratic Japanese institutional network. FDI in vertically organised keiretsu sectors generates inter-industry spillovers through backward and forward linkages, while FDI within sectors linked to vertical keiretsu activities adversely affects domestic productivity. Overall, our results suggest that the role of vertical keiretsu is more prevalent than that of horizontal keiretsu.

Japan’s industrial landscape has been dominated by institutional clusters or networks of inter-firm organisations through reciprocated, direct and indirect ties. However, interactions between inward investors and such institutionalised networks in the host economy are seldom explored. The role and characteristics of local business groups, in the form of keiretsu networks, have been investigated to determine the scale and scope of spillovers from inward FDI to Japanese establishments. This conceptualisation depends on the institutional mechanism and the market structure through which host economies absorb and exploit FDI.

This paper aims to conduct a systematic meta-analysis on emerging economies to summarize these effects and throw light on the strength and heterogeneity of these conditionalities.

This paper proposes a new methodological framework that allows country- and firm-level effects to be combined. The authors hand collected information from 175 studies and around 1,100 estimates in Eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa from 1940 to 2008.

The two main findings indicate that “macro” effects are much larger than enterprise-level ones, by a factor of at least six and the benefits from foreign direct investment (FDI) into emerging economies are substantially less “conditional” than commonly thought.

The empirical literature has not reached a conclusion as to whether FDI yields spillovers when the host economies are emerging. Instead, the results are often viewed as conditional. For macro studies, this means that the existence and scale of spillover effects are contingent on the levels of institutional, financial or human capital development attained by the host economies. For enterprise-level studies, conditionality relates to the type of inter-firm linkages, namely, forwards, backwards or horizontal.

Viewing the last dying embers of 1984, the Orwel‐lian year of Big Brother and some of its not‐so‐far off the mark predictions, the unemployment which one cannot help feeling is more apparent than real, it is hardly surprising that the subject of Poverty or the so‐called Poverty arise. The real poverty of undernourished children, soup kitchens, children suffering at Christmas, hungry children ravenously consuming free school meals has not, even now, returned.

A distinction must be drawn between a dismissal on the one hand, and on the other a repudiation of a contract of employment as a result of a breach of a fundamental term of that contract. When such a repudiation has been accepted by the innocent party then a termination of employment takes place. Such termination does not constitute dismissal (see London v. James Laidlaw & Sons Ltd (1974) IRLR 136 and Gannon v. J. C. Firth (1976) IRLR 415 EAT).