The presence of foreign multinational enterprises (MNEs) should benefit local economies. In particular if MNEs are particularly productive compared to domestic firms they may promote learning and catch-up of local firms. Such channel of spillovers from MNEs to local firms is known as the Veblen...

Recent contributions on offshoring often assume that firms can freely split their production process into separate steps which can be ranked according to the cost savings from producing abroad. We replace this assumption by the notion of a technologically determined sequence of production steps....