The barrier model of productivity growth suggests that individual country productivity is related to the world technology frontier disturbed by national barriers. We offer a country study of the barrier model exploiting the dramatic changes in the linkages to the world economy in South Africa....

Foreign exchange windfalls such as those from natural resource revenues change non-resource exports, imports, and the capital account. We study the balance between these responses and, using data on 41 resource exporters for 1970-2006, show that the response to a dollar of resource revenue is,...

June 2000 - The extent of corruption in a host country affects a foreign direct investor's choice of investing through a joint venture or through a wholly owned subsidiary. Corruption reduces inward foreign investment and shifts the ownership structure toward joint ventures. Smarzynska and Wei...

Technological progress has led to increasing importance of the international division of labour organized around global production and distribution networks. Multinational corporations have been a driving force behind these developments. This article studies the role of MNCs in integrating a...

The Czech and Slovak Customs Union (CSCU), which came into effect in January 1993, differs from regular regional trading arrangements as its goal was to minimize the economic cost of a decline in economic ties between its members rather than to set in motion the mechanism of integration. The...

The authors take a new look at the regulatory determinants of foreign direct investment (FDI) by asking whether labor market flexibility affects FDI flows across 25 Western and Eastern European countries. Their analysis is based on firm level data on new investments during the 1999-2001 period....

This paper studies the impact of corruption on inward foreign direct investment using a unique firm-level data set. It examines two effects of corruption simultaneously: a reduction in the volume of foreign investment and a shift in the ownership structure. Corruption makes local bureaucracy...

Many countries aim to attract foreign direct investment (FDI) by offering ever more generous incentive packages and justifying their actions with the expected knowledge externalities to be generated by foreign affiliates. Despite being hugely important to public policy, there is little...