Determinants and effects of direct foreign investment in Cote d'Ivoire, Morocco, and Venezuela

Despite the voluminous literature on direct foreign investment in the 1960s and 1970s, the empirical evidence on spillovers from foreign sources of equity investment remains slim. This chapter draws on new data sources for Cote d'lvoire, Morocco, and Venezuela to explore two related questions. To what extent do joint ventures or wholly owned for¬eign subsidiaries exhibit higher levels of productivity than their domestic counterparts? Does technology spill over from these foreign entrants to domestically owned firms? The research reported here is the first to exploit panel data at the level of individual firms, which allows a more detailed comparison of foreign and domestic firms than was previously possible. The behavior of foreign and domestic firms can be compared by sector, controlling for firm-specific attributes such as size. The panel nature of the data also allows the analysis to go beyond the cross-sectional studies of the past, which compared partial measures of productivity (such as labor productivity) across sectors. The availability of data for several countries permits exploration of the extent to which the impact of foreign investment is a general or a country-specific phenomenon.