This paper presents a comparative study of the importance of direct technology transfer and spillovers through FDI on a set of 10 transition countries, using a common methodology and appropriate methods to account for selection and simultaneity correction. This paper considers by far the largest firm level dataset (more than 90,000 firms) used by any study on the spillover effects of FDI. The main novelty of the paper is the explicit control for various sources of firm heterogeneity when accounting for different effects of FDI on firm performance. This work shows that the heterogeneity of firms in terms of absorptive capacity, size, productivity and technology levels affect the results. Controlling for these variables leads to some interesting results, which contrast with the previous empirical work in the field. We find that horizontal spillovers have become increasingly important over the last decade, and they may even become more important than vertical spillovers. Positive horizontal spillovers are equally distributed across size classes of firms, while negative horizontal spillovers seem to be more likely to accrue to smaller firms. Moreover, positive horizontal spillovers seem more likely to be present in medium or high productivity firms with higher absorptive capacities, while negative horizontal spillovers are more likely to affect low to medium productivity firms. These findings suggest that both direct effects from foreign ownership as well as the spillovers from foreign firms substantially depend on the absorptive capacity and productivity level of individual firms. In addition, these results show that foreign presence may also affect smaller firms to a larger extent than larger firms, but this impact may be in either direction.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1675662
In this paper, we emphasize the role of institutions as the underlying basis for economic and social activity. We describe and compare different institutional classification systems, which is rarely done in the literature, and show how to empirically operationalize institutional concepts. More than 30 established institutional indicators can be clustered into three homogeneous groups of formal institutions: legal, political and economic, which capture to a large extent the complete formal institutional environment of a country. We compute the latent quality of legal, political and economic institutions for every country in the world and for every year. On this basis,we propose a legal, political and economic World Institutional Quality Ranking, through which we can follow whether a country is improving or worsening its relative institutional environment. The calculated latent institutional quality measures can be especially useful in further panel data applications and add to the usual practice of using simply one or another index of institutional quality to capture the institutional environment. We make the Institutional Quality Dataset, covering up to 197 countries and territories from 1990 to 2010, freely available online.
COBISS.SI-ID: 32093277
This review article addresses three books dealing with regionalism. Article's aim is to initially present a definition of region based on a common ontological assumption of all three works, grounded in the changing nature of states on the 'inside' (the influence of globalization and information technology on states' control of their properties) and on the 'outside' (illustrated through the 'Mode 2.0 multilateralism' metaphor). The second part of the article deals with a substantive presentation of the books' contents through a short overview of the central research questions and an integration of findings of the three pieces of literature. Further on, an overview of the theoretical and methodological approaches is applied, and the intended readers of each piece of scholarship are identified. Finally, as no all-encompassing conclusion on theory or policy prescription can be drawn from objects of analysis stretching from EU's global actorness to EU level of regionness and to modes of Euroregionalism, the conclusion 'returns' to a reflection of the initial common ontological observation of all three studies. In the end, possible relevant issues for further research for the diverse disciplines of political science are offered.
COBISS.SI-ID: 31769181