Are there benefits to the host country from multinational investments? Does potential value from these investments make active industrial policy worthwhile? We answer the first question affirmatively, having reviewed economic principles and evidence concerning the effects of projects locating in...

This paper examines the impact of trade and fiscal reforms and of the 1994 devaluation of the CFA franc on enterprise development in Chad and Gabon. These reforms provide a natural experiment to assess the impact of trade liberalisation in countries with a small and backward manufacturing...

This paper examines whether multinational banks have a stabilising or a destabilising role during times of financial distress. With a focus on Europe, it looks at how these banks‟ foreign affiliates have been faring during the recent financial crisis. It finds that retail and corporate lending...

This paper examines whether the export decision of firms is affected by their ownership structure, specifically it looks at whether family control is an obstacle to entering foreign markets. The underlying assumption is that family firms are risk averse. Risk aversion may be an obstacle to...

This paper examines the relationship between the exposure to foreign trade and productivity growth for a sample of Indian manufacturing firms. By testing a catching up model of productivity growth, it sheds some light on the nature of the relationship between the exposure to foreign competition...

Foreign activities of MNEs have important effects on home economies. The debate is ambiguous: concerns that foreign investments deplete domestic economies are often coupled with the pride for doing good business in foreign countries. This paper addresses this question by defining the appropriate...

This paper provides a cross-country perspective to the firm-level analysis of the relation between foreign ownership and labour demand. We estimate labour demand equations in eleven European countries using dynamic panel data techniques on samples that permit to distinguish the ownership status...

This paper examines the impact of imported technologies on productivity for a sample of developing and transition countries in Central and Eastern Europe and in the Southern Mediterranean. These economies are getting more and more integrated to the European Union. The paper departs from earlier...

This Paper examines the link between imported technologies and a country’s export performance, as measured by product quality. The analysis is set against the background of the process of regional integration between the EU and its neighbouring developing countries. The underlying question is...

Transferring low tech manufacturing jobs to cheap labour countries is often seen by part of the general public and policy makers as a step into the de-industrialisation of the European economies. However, several recent contributions have shown that the effects on home economies are rarely...