ارتباطات بین المللی و بهره وری در سطح کارخانه: سرمایه گذاری مستقیم خارجی، صادرات، واردات و صدور مجوز

Productivity growth may be affected particularly for developing countries by international linkages or technology transfer. We evaluate relationships between productivity and FDI, exports, imports and licensing for Turkish manufacturing plants in the apparel, textiles, and motor vehicles industries. We assess performance premia associated with these international technology transfer channels that control for plant size and location. We then use a structural model to allow for plant-specific input composition and interactions, estimated alternatively by quantile regression and semi-parametric techniques to recognize plant heterogeneity and to accommodate simultaneity and selection issues. Overall, we find that productivity is most closely related to foreign ownership, especially for larger plants and in combination with other forms of technology transfer, followed by exporting and then licensing.

Productivity growth determines the ability of an economy to improve its standard of living, and is often considered to be the main source of cross-country income differences (Hall and Jones, 1999). An important issue in our increasingly global economic environment is thus whether international linkages can enhance firms' productivity and competitiveness. It may be particularly important for developing or low/middle income economies such as Turkey to identify how and to what extent productivity is related to international linkages that could narrow the income gap from more developed countries. Endogenous growth theory views innovation as the main source of productivity growth (Romer, 1990 and Lucas, 1988), although it may be associated with either internal or external factors. In particular, studies have shown that international linkages or technology transfer may be closely related to productivity growth (Coe and Helpman, 1995, Eaton and Kortum, 1999 and Keller, 2002). Countries such as Turkey that are still on a development path may especially rely on the technology and knowledge produced by more developed countries rather than direct investment in research and development.2 Four main channels of international linkages appear in the literature. Foreign ownership or foreign direct investment (FDI) is often considered the strongest conduit for international technology transfer (Blomström and Kokko, 1998, Aitken and Harrison, 1999 and Carr et al., 2001). Learning by exporting has perhaps received the greatest attention (Kraay, 1997, Clerides et al., 1998, Castellani, 2001, Bigsten et al., 2002 and Girma et al., 2003). The role of technology embodied in intermediate material and capital imports has been recognized (Grossman and Helpman, 1991, Xu and Wang, 1999 and Eaton and Kortum, 2001). Foreign licensing has also been considered (Eaton and Kortum, 1996), although it may not have a significant productive effect if the best technologies are not available by license (World Investment Report, 2000). These channels may have both separate and synergistic productive effects, as well as linkages with internal factors such as input mix or size. Blomström and Kokko (1998), for example, show that FDI may enhance host country firms' productivity through knowledge flows from cumulative R&D efforts in the foreign country, and of skilled employees and management techniques across countries. However, productive effects may concurrently arise from exports that move the domestic firms along the learning curve and imports of production technology by the multinational enterprises. Augmenting labor force skills in the host country is also essential for successful international technology transfer because it determines absorptive capacity (Nelson and Phelps, 1966). Higher shares of technical or management workers would thus be expected to be associated with greater productivity improvements from international linkages. There are two primary hypotheses about how firm productivity is related to international linkages. The first suggests that more productive firms self-select into, say, export markets, because their characteristics make them better able to deal with the costs and complexities of international markets. The second is that knowledge effects stem from exposure of exporting firms to cutting-edge technology and managerial skills from their international counterparts. Most empirical studies of export-productivity relationships support the self-selection hypothesis (Bernard and Jensen, 1995, Clerides et al., 1998, Aw et al., 2000 and Delgado et al., 2002), although others find learning-by-exporting (Kraay, 1997, Castellani, 2001, Bigsten et al., 2002, Girma et al., 2003 and Van Biesebroeck, 2005). Both of these effects may also be evident; firms that participate in international markets may be inherently more productive but also improve their productivity through international linkages (Yasar and Paul, 2005). The role of firm heterogeneity in explaining relationships between productivity and international technology transfer has also been explored theoretically. Melitz (2004) and Roberts and Tybout (1997) find that more productive producers in an industry become exporters, and Bernard et al. (2003) show that the heterogeneous efficiency underlying such choices implies correlations across firms' size, productivity, and export participation. Helpman et al. (2004) confirm that more productive firms enter foreign markets, and that the most productive ones engage in foreign direct investment. Our objective is to examine the relationships between Turkish manufacturing plant productivity (in the apparel, textile and motor vehicle industries) and all four technology transfer channels, allowing for heterogeneous international linkages, plant characteristics, and input mix. We first estimate within-industry proportional differences in performance indicators (premia), controlling for plant characteristics such as location and size, for plants with and without international linkages. We then directly examine production relationships underlying input use/mix and international technology transfer through production function regressions that allow a more structural analysis of plants' productive processes and performance. The structural analysis permits us to represent the productive effects of international linkages in more detail than typical estimation of a simple functional relationship at the industry or country level. However, plant heterogeneity raises implementation issues. For example, the average productive effect of technology transfer may not well reflect the effects on different plants with significant variations in capital intensity or size. Endogeneity issues inherent in production function estimation are also exacerbated when attempting to measure and interpret plant level productive impacts of international linkages. We deal with these issues in three ways. First, representing the production technology by a flexible (translog) functional form explicitly captures differential productivity patterns for plants with heterogeneous input composition, reliance on international technology transfer, and other plant-specific characteristics that our data allow us to identify. Second, using quantile regression techniques allows for plant heterogeneity by representing the technology transfer effects at different points of the conditional output distribution. Third, employing semi-parametric estimation including international linkages as state variables accommodates simultaneity and selection bias. Our overall conclusions are robust across methods. Our premia analysis suggests that plants with a foreign ownership share (FDI) are the most productive, followed by plants that export, especially in combination with other forms of international technology transfer. Plants with international linkages are also larger, pay more, invest more, and hire more administrative and technical workers. These findings are supported by the greater productivity effects associated with FDI and exporting than licensing and importing, stronger productivity–technology transfer relationships for larger plants, and higher productivity of especially larger plants with more skilled labor, found from production function estimation. In addition, our results show that a flexible functional form captures important input cross-effects, quantile regression reflects productive discrepancies by plant size, and controlling for simultaneity and selection bias increases the estimated productivity effects of technology transfer.

In this paper we examined the relationships between international linkages through four technology transfer channels and plant productivity in the Turkish apparel, textile, and motor vehicles manufacturing industries. Our evaluation was based on both regressions of performance indicators on international linkage variables, and estimation of a production function that captures more production structure and interrelationships. Our reliance on plant-level data, for our production function analysis in particular, raises heterogeneity issues. Standard productivity measurement techniques implicitly assume that plants within an industry share common productivity relationships, whereas they may actually differ in important ways. This potential heterogeneity is emphasized by Bernard et al. (2003), Melitz (2004), and Helpman et al. (2004), who theoretically examine the effect of within-sector heterogeneity of firms engaging in international activities. Our use of a translog functional form generalizes standard Cobb–Douglas production function models to capture plant heterogeneity through output–input interactions underlying productivity and scale effects. Incorporating data on key plant characteristics normally unobserved for econometric analysis also reduces difficulties arising from heterogeneity. However, at least two issues remain that were controlled for using alternative stochastic models. First, great variation in plant size could veil differences in productivity relationships for different size plants, which we deal with using quantile regression techniques. Second, endogeneity or simultaneity problems arise when including technology transfer variables in the production function, which we accommodate using an Olley and Pakes (1996) semi-parametric estimation procedure. The primary results do not differ substantively by stochastic specification. However, as expected from theory, estimates of the productivity relationships with international linkages vary by quantile, with stronger ties often apparent for the larger quantiles, and are underestimated compared to the OP estimates. Our results for all our estimation models and methods confirm that firms with international linkages are more productive. In particular, they support findings in the recent literature that foreign ownership (FDI) and exporting are positively related to plant-level productivity, and that the FDI effect is greater than that for exports. Further, licensing and importing technology are significantly related to productivity, and to the productivity implications of FDI and exporting. In addition, internal plant characteristics such as the share of skilled labor enhance the productive role of international linkages.