1st Edition

Multinational Firms and Impacts on Employment, Trade and Technology New Perspectives for a New Century

Edited By Robert E. Lipsey, Jean-Louis Mucchielli Copyright 2001

    For decades governments, politicians, and trade unions have feared that firms investing abroad involved a loss of employment and a decline in wages for the home country, the implied assumption being that global production and consumption are somehow fixed. Similarly, research on multinational firms has tended to present them as having a number of alternatives - export, licensing or foreign direct investment - for the exploitation of fixed foreign markets.
    In reality, the complex relationships between parent companies and their foreign affiliates must be examined very carefully and with the most disaggregated statistics available if we are to get an accurate understanding of firms impacts. A major obstacle to this research has been the confidential nature of the necessary data. This collection, with contributions from many distinguished writers in the field, presents work which has been able to exploit relevant data for countries such as the United States, France, Italy, Belgium and Japan.

    Part I: Multinational Firms, International Production and Home Employment

    1. Foreign Production by US Firms and Parent Firm Employment

    Part II: Multinational Firms and International Trade: FDI and Export, FDI and Intra-Firm Trade

    2. Relationships between Trade and FDI Flows within Two Panels of US and French Industries

    3. Intra-Firm Trade and Foreign Direct Investment: an Empirical Analysis of French Firms

    4. Foreign Investment Transactions and International Trade Linkages

    5. Intra-Firm Trade and Market Structure

    Part III: Multinational Firms, Linkages and Spillover Effects

    6. Linkages, Multinationals and Industrial Development

    7. Local Procurement by Japanese Manufacturing Affiliates

    Part IV: Multinational Firms, Structure and Diffusion of Technology and Innovation: How it is Structured in the Context of Globalization

    8. The Effectiveness of Intellectual Property Rights: an Exploration of French Survey Data

    9. The Innovative Activities of Multinational Firms in Italy

    10. Innovative Strategies and Know-How Flows in International Companies: Some Evidence from Belgian Manufacturing

    11. Foreign Direct Investment as Technology Sourcing

    Biography

    Lipsey, Robert E. ; Mucchielli, Jean-Louis