Revisiting the Impacts of Domestic and Foreign Technology Spillovers on Canadian Industries, 1978-1997

This paper studies the impacts of domestic and international technology spillovers on the total factor productivity of 14 Canadian manufacturing industries in 1978-1997 to examine whether different industries have different technology spillover rates. To test this hypothesis, the industries are broken down into three groups based on their characteristics as Low-Tech, Medium-Tech, and High-Tech. As expected, we observe different spillovers behaviors for these groups: while only foreign R&D has a statistically significant impact on productivity during this period when all industries are considered and domestic R&D is not significant under any of the specifications, the impact of domestics R&D on Low-Tech and High-Tech industries becomes significant when the industries are grouped based on their characteristics.