Multinational enterprises (MNEs) increasingly impose "Responsible Sourcing" (RS) standards on their suppliers worldwide, including requirements on worker compensation, benefits and working conditions. Are these policies just "hot air" or do they impact exposed suppliers and their workers? What...

The objective of this report is to examine the extent to which countries in Latin America and the Caribbean participate in global value chains and what are the drivers of such participation. Production processes have been increasingly fragmented worldwide. For example, the production of the...

Within Japanese multinational firms, parent exports from Japan to a foreign region are positively related to production in that region by affiliates of that parent, given the parent's home production in Japan and the region's size and income level. This relationship is similar to that found for...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the intertemporal linkages between FDI and disaggregated measures of international trade. We outline a model exemplifying some of these linkages, describe several methods for investigating two-way feedbacks between various categories of trade, and...

The paper provides a reconciliation of Lucas' paradox, based on fixed setup costs of new investments. With such costs, it does not pay a firm to make a small' investment, even though such an investment is called for by marginal productivity conditions. Using a sample of 45 developed and...

Case studies of export behavior suggest that firms who penetrate foreign markets reduce entry costs for other potential exporters, either through learning by doing or through establishing buyer- supplier linkages. We pursue the idea that spillovers associated with one firm's export activity...

This Economica Coase Lecture reviews research that has revolutionized the field of international trade and foreign direct investment. It explains the motivation behind the development of new analytical frameworks, the nature of these frameworks, and the empirical studies that sprouted from them

The explosion of multinational activities in recent decades is rapidly transforming the global landscape of industrial production. But are the emerging clusters of multinational production the rule or the exception? What drives the offshore agglomeration of multinational firms in comparison to...

The degree of internationalizaton of the enterprise or business sectors of many countries, as measured by the ratio of direct investment abroad to domestic wealth or assets, or of assets or employment abroad to that at home, has been growing over the last twenty years or more. The exception to...