Transbordamentos de Produtividade na Indústria Brasileira: evidências empíricas 1997-2000

According to the literature on foreign direct investment (FDI) spillovers, when a transnational company (TNC) subsidiary is installed in a hots country, it comes with a package of new technologies that can be transferred to domestic companies, helping them to improve their productivity and competitiveness. In this sense, FDI is a powerful source of technology to developing countries, justifying every sort of incentive to attract foreign investments. In this paper we use firm level data and econometric techniques to assess the existence of productivity spillovers in the Brazilian industry in the 1997-2000 period. In the horizontal spillovers' model we found evidences of technology transfer from TNCs to domestic firms, although not for all firms. Actually we show that when national companies were more exposed to the TNCs competition, negative spillovers occurred. In the vertical spillovers' model we found evidences of positive productivity spillovers taking place through backward linkages.