This paper examines how foreign plants may impact on the averages wages paid by domestic plants within a host economy. The analysis, building on Aitken, Harrison and Lipsey (1996), is based on plant level panel data for the Irish manufacturing industry during the 1990s. We find that respective...

The increasingly important role of multinational enterprises (MNEs) in the global economy is linked to questions of how the foreign direct investment (FDI) they control impacts on overall economic activity in the recipient countries. Of specific interest is the policy context in which such FDI...

Overall labour productivity in the Irish manufacturing sector increased by 158 per cent between 1991 and 1999. This growth in labour productivity coincided with strong growth in employment during the same period, in stark contrast to the experience of other European countries. This paper...

This paper links the literature that analyses the sources of productivity growth with that which explores differences between the characteristics of exporters and non-exporters to examine the contributions to aggregate labour productivity growth of both groups. The analysis used Irish...

Recent research has sought to explore whether exporting enterprises have superior performance characteristics relative to non-exporters, and whether such superiority is associated with performance pre- and/or post- exporting. This paper extends existing research by examining the influence of...

Should economies that promote themselves as export platforms for FDI be expected to experience relatively high levels of export spillovers from foreign to host-country enterprises? To investigate how export decisions of host-country enterprises are associated with the presence and export...

This paper studies the welfare losses from tariff protection in a general model of a small open economy where some factors are internationally mobile. It is shown that, as long as the economy remains incompletely specialised international factor mobility must raise the cost of protection. This...

It is often argued that foreign firms may enhance the productivity of indigenous firms in an economy, through forward or backward linkages. Such externality effects typically are called "productivity spillovers". In terms of foreign direct investment (FDI), Ireland is one of the most globalized...