سرمایه گذاری مستقیم خارجی ظاهری و کارایی فنی: شواهدی از شرکت های تولیدی در تایوان

This paper uses firm-level panel data from Taiwan's manufacturing industries from 1987 to 2000 to investigate the impact of outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) on the technical efficiency of the OFDI firms. Propensity score matching is used to construct an appropriate group of non-OFDI firms to compare with OFDI firms, and a metafrontier framework is subsequently used to calculate comparable technical efficiencies for both groups of firms. Our empirical results reveal that the technical efficiencies of Taiwan's manufacturing firms were increasing over the entire sample period. In addition, our results suggest that the technological advances and the technical efficiency of Taiwan's manufacturing firms are positively correlated with their OFDI activity.

The considerable appreciation of Taiwan's currency and rapid increases in labor costs have pushed many Taiwanese firms in traditional industries to move to low-cost developing countries since the late 1980s.1 Taiwan has become a major investor around the world, particularly in mainland China. The possibility of industrial hollowing-out induced by this direct oversea investment has become a great concern in Taiwan. However, theoretical research regarding this issue is limited, and extant empirical evidence remains mixed.2 Most previous studies on the home country effects of outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) in general and technical efficiency in particular ignore two important evaluation problems. First, because firms consciously choose whether to become an OFDI firm, the self-selection problem will confound the effects of OFDI with other characteristics when the efficiency changes of OFDI firms are compared to those of non-OFDI firms. Second, firms might face distinct environments; therefore, their managers may adopt heterogeneous technologies or strategies. Simply combining all the observations from different groups and estimating a common frontier for the evaluation of technical efficiency may be invalid. The purpose of this paper is to employ Taiwanese firm-level panel data to investigate the relationship between OFDI activity and the technical efficiency of the investing firms. To correct for selection bias, the propensity score matching method is used to construct an appropriate comparison group from the non-OFDI firms to compare the efficiency between these two groups. In addition, to solve the heterogeneous technology problem, the metafrontier approach developed by Battese, Rao, & O’Donnell (2004) and O’Donnell, Rao, & Battese (2008) is used. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. The next section provides a brief literature review. Section 3 illustrates the evaluation problems in measuring the impact of OFDI on domestic performance and presents the propensity score matching approach. Section 4 introduces the metafrontier framework and the stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) method used to calculate comparable efficiencies of firms in different groups. Section 5 describes the data set, constructs a matched sample, and presents our empirical results. The last section provides brief concluding remarks.

Taiwanese manufacturing firms have actively undertaken OFDI since the late 1980s. The possible industrial hollowing-out has been a great concern in Taiwan. This paper employs firm-level panel data on the manufacturing industries from 1987 to 2000 to investigate the impact of the OFDI on the technical efficiencies of the investing firms. The propensity score matching method used in this paper allows for the construction of an appropriate comparison group. A metafrontier framework is adopted to calculate comparable technical efficiencies for both the OFDI firms and the non-OFDI firms. The empirical results reveal that it is essential to construct an appropriate control group for comparison when examining the effect of foreign direct investment on technical efficiency. Our empirical results show that the technical efficiencies of the Taiwanese firms increased over the sample period. However, there are a number of differences in the sources of the efficiency changes between the OFDI firms and non-OFDI firms. While the improvement in the technical efficiency of the non-OFDI firms is mostly attributable to the improvements in group technical efficiency, the improvement in the technical efficiency of the OFDI firms can be attributed to technological advances and improvements in group technical efficiency. In addition, although the OFDI firms’ technology lags behind the technology of the non-OFDI firms, and OFDI firms are less competitive before they invest abroad, their disadvantages are reduced so considerably that the gap between these two groups of firms is statistically insignificant. These results suggest that the technological advances and technical efficiency of the Taiwanese firms are positively correlated with their OFDI activities. The findings in this paper have important implications for a firm's strategic decision-making and a country's investment policy. First, facing an unfavorable domestic production environment, a firm might need to adjust their operating strategies according to their comparative advantages. While the less productive firms should relocate their production to take advantage of a lower wages, the more productive firms would benefit from staying at home. Second, our empirical results indicate that in contrast to the prevailing concern of industrial hollowing-out induced by the OFDI activity in Taiwan, a relocation strategy might be an invaluable channel for some firms to manage unfavorable operating circumstances at home. In other words, it might be necessary for the Taiwanese government to pursue a more permissive or supportive policy toward OFDI activity to sustain its industrial development and achieve further rapid economic growth.