This paper uses industry and province specific Chinese industrial data to demonstrate a potential causal link between two strands of the FDI literature. The first strand suggests that the impact of spillovers from inw...This paper uses industry and province specific Chinese industrial data to demonstrate a potential causal link between two strands of the FDI literature. The first strand suggests that the impact of spillovers from inward FDI is less robust in middle-income economies than in either high-income or low-income economies. The second strand suggests diminishing returns of inward FDI on horizontal labor productivity in low-technology industries but not in high-technology industries. This paper suggests a link between these two phenomena. Specifically, if both FDI intensity and industry mix vary with the level of economic development, then an industry-dependent relationship between inward FDI and horizontal spillovers could cause middle-income economies to derive fewer benefits from inward FDI than either high- or low-income economies. This paper also verifies the curvilinear relationship between FDI in low-technology industries and horizontal labor productivity without relying on problematic FDI from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macao.展开更多
文摘This paper uses industry and province specific Chinese industrial data to demonstrate a potential causal link between two strands of the FDI literature. The first strand suggests that the impact of spillovers from inward FDI is less robust in middle-income economies than in either high-income or low-income economies. The second strand suggests diminishing returns of inward FDI on horizontal labor productivity in low-technology industries but not in high-technology industries. This paper suggests a link between these two phenomena. Specifically, if both FDI intensity and industry mix vary with the level of economic development, then an industry-dependent relationship between inward FDI and horizontal spillovers could cause middle-income economies to derive fewer benefits from inward FDI than either high- or low-income economies. This paper also verifies the curvilinear relationship between FDI in low-technology industries and horizontal labor productivity without relying on problematic FDI from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macao.
