Title: The role of Multinationals in Local Innovation: A new look at spillovers based on innovation surveys 1
Abstract: This paper investigates spillovers from multinationals to local firms, using information from two Norweigan innovation surveys. Most empirical studies of such spillovers focus on how R&D expenditures in multinationals affect the productivity of local firms, measured in terms of TFP or labour productivity. Since R&D expenditures is an input measure and TFP-growth may be affected by a series of other factors that are hard to identify, we claim that knowledge spillovers are mapped better by looking at innovation activities, which more correctly maps the output of R&D. To map these spillovers, we link enterprises responses from the 1997 and 2001 innovation surveys. Norway is one of very few countries where the innovation survey is compulsory, providing us with an impressively high response rate and several thousand innovators. We then develop a model that allows us to explore whether foreign subsidiaries are more or less likely to transfer technology to the local economy, correcting for firm size, industry, absorptive capacity, and other aspects of the innovative behaviour of enterprises. Using a probit model, we find that international cooperative agreements are important for the Norwegian economy, but that foreign ownership does not facilitate knowledge spillovers to the local economy. In this paper we ask whether spillovers form multinationals come more easy than spillovers from other local firms, and whether such spillovers depend on industrial closeness, geographical proximity and R&D cooperation agreements. Finally, we test whether efforts of multinationals to dampen the leakage of knowledge and innovations has any real effect on spillovers to local firms.
Publication Year: 2005
Publication Date: 2005-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot