东道国市场的跨国公司、竞争和生产力.doc

Multinational Firms, Competition, and Productivity in Host-Country Markets Richard E. Caves B. Variables and Specifications The data source available for Australia provides estimates of value-added and employment in the foreign-owned and domestic sectors, and thus allows the construction for each of a crude measure of productivity ?value-added per employee. We must face the hazards of measuring productivity by output per unit of a single input. Another constraint is the aggregation of the Australian data. Only 23 manufacturing industries are covered, and one of these (musical instruments, with total employment of less than one thousand and productivity in the domestic sector one-quarter of that in foreign subsidiaries) had to be discarded. Because of these and other limitations, these data will not bear the weight of some of the subtle research designs that economic theory can suggest. But those designs also require the assumption of purely competitive long-run equilibrium, foresworn at the start of this paper. We employ weaker statistical tests consistent with both the data available and the assumption about microeconomic relations set forth above. A subsequent section considers competing theoretical frame-works that would require stronger assumptions about production functions. We seek to explain value-added per worker in the home-owned sectors (VW) of Australian manufacturing industries. What matters, clearly, is the level in an industrys home-owned sector relative to that attained by competing foreign subsidiaries (VWs). In the regressions reported below the dependent variable is VWA, and VWs is placed among the independent variables to take account of its interaction with them. Regressions were also estimated with VWA/VWs as the dependent variable: the poor results suggest that the interaction of other variables with VWs needs to be utilized. Our chief hypothesis holds that a larger population of subsidiaries in an industry will, in the long run, induce higher