Foreign direct investment (FDI) projects are assumed to be accompanied by potential external effects - so-called FDI spillovers - which are supposed to affect productivity levels of other firms in a host country. Empirical results on this topic are inconclusive and most studies focus on one...

One goal of China's Go Out policy is to create goodwill in countries around the world. At the same time, China's growing economic engagement has provoked much criticism. This paper is the first to study whether these activities change the attitudes of individuals in developing countries towards...

This paper looks at the trade off between investment incentives and exit costs for the location of foreign direct investment (FDI). This issue does not appear to have been tackled in much detail in the literature. The analysis considers the effect of profit taxation (as a measure of investment...

Vietnam has integrated into global value chains through the establishment of special economic zones (SEZs). This paper examines the local labour-market impacts of this programme, building on a unique dataset of SEZs in combination with labour force survey (LFS) data. Using historical satellite...

This paper investigates the effects of multinational corporations on labor standards. We argue that the previous literature has failed to distinguish the different motives that encourage firms to become multinational. Therefore, we build a stylized model of segmented labor markets with...

Using data on Chinese large-scale overseas investment and project contracts by sector, we analyze whether Chinese outward activity (COA) before the crisis worsened or alleviated the contractionary phases in developing countries. We find that, on average, COA did not increase vulnerability to the...

This paper uses micro-data from the World Bank Investment Climate Surveys 2002-2006 to investigate how foreign ownership and access to external finance affect the likelihood of manufacturers in emerging markets to export and/or import. Applying propensity score matching to control for...