This paper reconsiders the link between welfare state provision, globalisation and competitiveness empirically. We challenge the conventional wisdom that welfare states, large-scale public provision of social insurance and progressive systems of redistributive taxation are incompatible with...

The conventional wisdom is that increasing globalisation requires a reduction in the provision of the welfare state among industrialised countries as the distortions resulting from this type of expenditure undermine international competitiveness and the ability of countries to attract and/or...

Fears of job losses and of increasing inequality loom large in current debates on how globalization is affecting our economies. By fundamentally changing the organization of production and work, globalization creates complex and changing patterns of winners and losers. Globalization thus creates...

In this paper we analyse productivity spillovers from foreign direct investment using firm level panel data UK manufacturing industries from 1992 to 1999. We investigate spillovers through horizontal, backward and forward linkages, distinguish spillovers from export oriented vs domestic market...

This Paper calculates returns to scale (RTS) and productivity growth in UK manufacturing establishments in the electronics and food industries. Our results show that foreign establishments tend to have lower returns to scale than their domestic counterparts. We also examine the effect of the...

This Paper investigates whether the acquisition of a domestic establishment by a foreign owner has any effects, positive or negative, on the survival prospects and employment growth of that plant. The empirical analysis uses data from the Annual Respondents Database (ARD) for the UK electronics...

We examine the differential effects of financial status and exporting activity on the likelihood of survival for firms in the UK and France - two countries with different financial systems. We aim to answer two main questions: What is the direct impact of financial characteristics and different...

This paper focuses on the role of absorptive capacity in determining whether or not domestic firms benefit from productivity spillovers from FDI using establishment level data for the UK. We allow for different effects of FDI on establishments located at different quantiles of the productivity...