Foreign Direct Investment, Technological Capabilities and Performance in the Chinese Pharmaceutical Industry

Does a firm engage in a joint venture with a technologically advanced foreign partner to complement or substitute investment in its own technological capabilities? We address this question in a comparative study of 222 Chinese pharmaceutical manufacturers and Sino-foreign joint ventures. A combination of ANOVA and OLS regression results provideevidence that firms with joint ventures invest more in organizational resources associated with technological capabilities, are higher performing by a number of absolute and relative measures, and have different correlates of high performance than firms without joint ventures.