Transnational Corporations - Volume 26, Issue 1, 2019

Costa Rica has sought to improve its position in the global economy by prioritizing export growth in two high-tech manufacturing industries led by foreign direct investment (FDI): electronics and medical devices. We use a global value chain (GVC) perspective to identify key commonalities and contrasts in Costa Rica’s performance in upgrading these two sectors. Because the electronics and medical devices GVCs have very different structures in Costa Rica (electronics is dominated by a single large firm, Intel, whereas medical devices has a highly diversified set of foreign manufacturers), multiple forms of upgrading, downgrading and knowledge spillovers are possible. Although the experience of these two industries illustrates different paths to upgrading, developing backward linkages in Costa Rica was not the preferred nor the only way of moving up the value chain. The medical devices sector exhibited more traditional knowledge spillovers and labor market features of local industrial agglomerations, whereas the electronics sector demonstrated significant wage and skill-level gains because of the incorporation of high-value service activities due to the evolving global strategy of its GVC lead firm, Intel. By combining a GVC perspective with a focus on knowledge flows and value creation at the local level, we seek to promote more explicit integration of international business and economic geography concepts and methods.

Recent decades have seen the emergence of global value chain (GVC) production arrangements in which firms fine-slice production processes and disperse activities over multiple countries. This paper analyses how the rise of GVCs affects trade politics in developed countries. Our theoretical model shows that GVCs drive a wedge between the interests of workers and of managers in unskilled-labourintensive industries, upsetting a traditional coalition that has favoured protectionism against competing imports. Managers of GVC firms switch towards favouring trade promotion since they can substitute foreign for local unskilled workers. The loss of their management ally further weakens the position of low-skilled workers, whose jobs and income are threatened by foreign competition. This new trend may help to explain the recent surge in anti-trade sentiment, while indicating the importance of an active policy response to deal with the economic challenges for affected

The state, especially in emerging economies, plays a key role in influencing firm behaviour, including outward foreign direct investment (OFDI). Often literature on the state’s influence on OFDI stresses direct state ownership. However, the state can influence OFDI in several ways, including policy support and subsidies; the literature has largely overlooked these effects. We build on key insights from the comparative capitalisms literature to put forward a series of propositions on how home-country measures – in both emerging and developed economies – to boost OFDI will influence, inter alia, the volume, location and mode of firms’ investments abroad. We thus contribute to the literature by showing how government policies across a wide range of countries influence an important aspect of firm behaviour that has economic, social and environmental implications.

In this paper we study the determinants of the strength of patent enforcement in 43 member countries of the World Trade Organization (WTO) between 1998 and 2011, a period after the signing of the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement. We do so by building on and expanding the seminal work of Ginarte and Park (1997) on the pre-TRIPS determinants of patent rights in the years 1960-1990. We find that in the years after TRIPS was signed, the strength of patent enforcement of a country is positively determined by two variables that signify the usage of the patent and intellectual property system, the number of patent and trademark applications. We also find that the level of research and development expenditure, the quality of human capital, and the level of development of a country have positive effects on the strength of the enforcement of patent law in practice. Intellectual property rights enforcement is one of the key investment-related policies included in the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) Investment Policy Framework for Sustainable Development. Identifying the determinants of strong patent systems will help policymakers at the national and supranational levels to design and implement effective policies that strengthen national patent systems, thereby enhancing economic benefits such as greater levels of commercialization of intangible assets and greater levels of international trade and investment.

This paper presents a novel computational method to determine the distribution of ultimate investors in bilateral FDI stock. The approach employs results from the probabilistic theory of absorbing Markov chains. The method allows for the estimation of a bilateral matrix that provides inward positions by ultimate counterparts for over 100 recipient countries, covering 95% of total FDI stock and including many developing countries. Reconstructing the global FDI network by ultimate investors enables a more accurate and complete snapshot of international production than do standalone bilateral FDI statistics. This has considerable implications for policymaking. It also provides more nuanced context to some contemporary developments such as the trade tensions between the United States, China and others, as well as Brexit.