This paper discusses the entry of China into the game of foreign finance in Africa. It analyses the scope, destination and sectoral distribution of Chinese financial flows and trade in comparison with Western patterns and trends of aid, foreign direct investment FDI and trade. Chinas foreign aid...

Recent cross country panel data studies find a positive impact of internet use on economic growth and a positive impact of internet use on trade. The present study challenges the first finding by showing that internet use does not explain economic growth directly in a fully specified growth...

Low levels of infrastructure quality and quantity can create trade impediments through increased transport costs. Since the late 1990s an increasing number of trade studies have taken infrastructure into account. The purpose of the present paper is to quantify the importance of infrastructure...

Recent empirical studies of firm-level performance have tested complementarity in the case of multiple practices. These papers have drawn conclusions using potentially biased estimates of pair-wise interaction effects. We develop a consistent and simple testing framework and test it against...

National framework conditions mediate the effect of technological capabilities of firms on their productivity. Although this has been recognized in the literature for a long time, a quantitative test that explicitly considers this hypothesis has been lacking. Using a World Bank datasets of about...

We examine the impact of internal and external R&D on labor productivity in a 6-year panel of Dutch manufacturing firms. We apply a dynamic linear panel data model that allows for decreasing or increasing returns to scale in internal and external R&D and for economies of scope. We find...

Using firm level data from five countries - Brazil, Ecuador, South Africa, Tanzania and Bangladesh - this paper examines the knowledge-based determinants of productivity of firms active in food processing, textiles, and garments and leather products. In particular, it seeks to investigate the...

Empirical research on strategic alliances has focused on the idea that alliance partners are selected on the basis of social capital considerations. In this paper we emphasize instead the role of complementary knowledge stocks (broadly defined) in partner selection, arguing not only that...

Using micro data from Brazilian manufacturing firms, this paper investigates the impact of a wide set of innovation activities on firms' total factor productivity (TFP) and its subsequent effect on firm growth, measured by sales. Controlling for size and age of the firms, productivity levels and...

In this paper, we undertake a comparative study of the performance of local and foreign competitors’ manufacturing firms in a FDI-recipient region—Guangdong Province, China—and analyzes the policy implications of the comparison for the advanced, FDI-outflow region—Hong Kong Special...