The levels and interactions of foreign connections and size may be important determinants of plant productivity and efficiency, particularly in a developing country such as Turkey. We explore the productive contributions of foreign ownership (FDI), emphasizing its linkages with plant size and input composition, for plants in the Turkish motor vehicle and parts industry. We evaluate the implications of FDI for overall productivity, input-specific contributions, and returns to scale, using OLS, stochastic production frontier, and quantile (size-specific) regression estimates of a translog production function model. We find significantly higher productivity of plants with foreign ownership, driven by a higher marginal product of labor, particularly for smaller plants. This effect augments the productive contributions of technical progress, capital intensity, and increasing returns to scale. FDI is also associated with a greater productive contribution of imported capital investment.

It seems that technology gains from foreign investment are captured entirely by joint ventures.

This collection of papers from the NIESR conference at the British Academy identifies the channels through which inward investment can affect host economies, and provides quantitative evidence on the extent to which inward investment has acted to shape the size and structure of industrialised economies over the last decade. Leading authors in the fields of international investment and the behaviour of national and multinational firms combine innovative methodologies and firm-level data to enable empirical evaluation of the impact of inward investment. Detailed studies of aspects of inward investment in the UK are put into context through a review of existing literature and by comparison of UK developments to those experienced by French, Italian, German and US economies.

A great deal of public policy is harnessed to raising productivity growth. Although it is believed that the process is intimately linked to globalization, the precise links are less well known. This volume offers a comprehensive overview of links between international trade, foreign direct investment and productivity growth, providing a series of empirical analyses of these links.