The aim of this paper is to explore how a recent methodology developed to look at export dynamics in a region in a large economy can be extended to look at export dynamics in a small open economy, where local market size means that enterprises tend to engage in exporting at an early stage in...

This paper analyses the spatial concentration and sectoral specialisation of local enterprises (LEs) and multinational enterprises (MNEs) in Ireland. Entropy indices are used as indicators of spatial and sectoral clustering in Irish manufacturing. Correlation coefficients are calculated to...

This paper analyses the development and the determinants of backward linkages between electronics firms and domestic sub-suppliers in Ireland using data for 1982 to 1995. We find that, even when controlling for other firm and sector specific factors, foreign firms have lower linkages than Irish...

Is Research and Development activity an important determinant of the probability that a plant will survive? We model the survival of a cohort of Indigenous plants over the period 1986 to 1996 as a function of sectoral and firm characteristics. We use a firm-level dataset provided by Forfás, the...

This paper analyses the sectoral distribution of US investment across EU member countries. We attempt to determine whether investment is sectorally concentrated by country and whether there seems to be any evidence of increased sectoral specialisation in US investment as the EU market has become...

This paper examines possible productivity spillovers from foreign-owned firms to indigenous firms in the manufacturing sector in Ireland, using a firm-level panel of all firms in the Irish manufacturing sector over the period 1991-1998. The approach commonly applied in the literature to examine...

This paper uses micro-data to examine the relationship between R&D activity and employment growth. The R&D and employment data used are drawn from a survey of the Irish manufacturing sector undertaken by Forfás, the policy and advisory board for industrial development in Ireland. By...

From its inception in the late 1940s, Irish industrial policy has attempted to disperse industrial plants across regions, thereby avoiding the problem of rural-urban migration experienced by many developing countries. Analysing a large sample of companies which established in Ireland in the...

In this paper we provide empirical evidence on the determinants of firm start-up size using data for the manufacturing sector in Ireland, and compare our results with recent findings for Portuguese manufacturing industries (Mata and Machado, 1996). To allow for firm heterogeneity between firm...

This paper considers an economy that has the option of opening up its service sector to international trade at either the factor or the product level. Assuming nonidentical technologies in the context of a competitive, specific-factors framework, the paper shows that opening up trade always...