Publications

The KCG has various series of publications to provide research findings and policy implications to different interested groups, e.g., students, academics, policy makers and the public. The list of publications will be updated on a regular basis and is available as a PDF file here.

South-South FDI: Is It Really Different?

4th July 2017
KCG Secretary
Authors: Robert Gold, Holger Görg, Aoife Hanley and Adnan Šerić (Review of World Economics, 2017, Vol. 153(4), 657-673)

We compare the performance of Northern and Southern multinationals in Sub-Saharan Africa, and contrast it with local firms in the host country. Employing unique firm level data for 19 Sub-Saharan African countries, we show that firms receiving FDI outperform domestic ones, while the origin of the foreign investor is of minor importance. We use four different definitions of “South” to compare Northern and Southern FDI. Overall, we do not find strong differences in terms of firm productivity growth between Northern and Southern FDI, irrespective of how the latter is defined. […]

Holger Görg: G20 May Support Developing Countries to Set up Functioning Investment Promotion Agencies

15th June 2017
KCG Secretary
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In a new “Süddeutsche” article, Holger Görg suggests that G20 may help developing countries set up functioning investment promotion agencies, in order to attract not just FDI but Quality FDI to foster economic development in these countries. Empirical studies show clearly that being integrated into global supply chains as parts of multinational enterprises (MNEs) or their suppliers is advantageous for developing countries. Local firms involved have a higher level of productivity and are more capable of paying higher wages compared to other local firms without global engagement[…]

Holger Görg Gave an Interview on Global Supply Chains and Developing Countries

1st June 2017
KCG Secretary
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When Labour Ministers of G20 countries met two weeks ago in Germany, they reached a consensus on the critical importance of jointly coping with labour market challenges, such as poor working conditions and unfair wage in particularly emerging and developing countries.

More and more emerging and developing countries as well as their economic agents have been increasingly integrated into the global supply chains through new and/or expanding investments of multinational enterprises (MNEs) from the developed countries. Many argue that these MNEs have invested in emerging and developing countries mainly to seek cost advantages supported by low-wage labour, low-cost resources and less strict environmental and labour market regulations on site.[…]

New KCG Study on South-South FDI in Africa

26th May 2017
KCG Secretary
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Foreign direct investment (FDI) was traditionally dominated by firms from developed countries. These countries were also popular FDI destination countries for a long while. Over the past decade, however, more and more developing economies became increasingly intensively integrated in the FDI engagement worldwide – as sourcing as well as destination countries. Driven by the expectation that determinants and effects of FDI from developing economies to developing countries (South-South FDI) may differ from those of traditional FDI both within developed countries (North-North FDI) and from developed countries to developing countries (North-South FDI), there has been an increasing amount of Studies on South-South FDI over time. One of the main research regions for such a specific form of FDI is East/South-East Asia. In contrast, empirical analyses on South-South FDI in Africa are very limited. This may be partially attributable to the lack of reliable representative datasets for the analysis.[…]

KCG Working Paper No. 3: South-South FDI: Is It Really Different?

26th May 2017
KCG Secretary
Publications
Publications
Authors: Robert Gold, Holger Görg, Aoife Hanley and Adnan Seric

We compare the performance of Northern and Southern multinationals in Sub-Saharan Africa, and contrast it with local firms in the host country. Employing unique firm level data for 19 Sub-Saharan African countries, we show that firms receiving FDI outperform domestic ones, while the origin of the foreign investor is of minor importance. We use four different definitions of “South” to compare Northern and Southern FDI. Overall, we do not find strong differences in terms of firm productivity growth between Northern and Southern FDI, irrespective of how the latter is defined. We also find that employment growth is generally higher for firms receiving FDI from other African investors as compared to Northern FDI, and they also receive more technology transfer from their parent company abroad.

KCG Working Paper No. 2: Firms’ Global Engagement and Management Practices

27th April 2017
KCG Secretary
Publications
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Authors: Holger Görg and Aoife Hanley

We investigate whether firms’ "global engagement", either in the form of exporting or opening up affiliates abroad, is related to the change in their management performance. We use new and unique data from a recent large scale firm survey of management practices in Germany. We calculate management scores for firms as in Bloom et al. (2013), which indicate how structured management is in a given firm .[…]

KCG Policy Paper No.2: How to Attract Quality FDI?

14th February 2017
KCG Secretary
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Authors: Theodore H. Moran, Holger Görg, Adnan Seric and Christiane Krieger‐Boden

Foreign direct investment in developing countries has got a bad reputation in some popular discussions where it is set tantamount to first world’s postcolonial exploitation of the raw materials and cheap labour from the third world, associated with pictures of leaking oil fields and collapsing factories. While this does happen, data show that FDI[…]

Key Relevance of Global Supply Chains in Discussing whether Globalization is Good or not

9th February 2017
KCG Secretary
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Is globalization good or not? This question has already attracted much attention worldwide with the intensifying globalization during the past decades. Undoubtedly, different economic agents, decision makers and governments from different countries may have strongly different answers to this seemingly simple question. This question turns, however, to be answered in a very simple and provocative way for political purposes over the last year, as did, for example, by Donald Trump on his way to the U.S. Presidency. His belief in globalization doing more harm than good to the U.S. economy induced him to stop ongoing discussions on trade agreements such as TPP and TTIP with different partners in the world[…]

Merits of Financial Market Development for Developing Countries

30th December 2016
KCG Secretary
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Financial market development has its impact on economic development wide beyond national boundaries. Here multinational enterprises (MNEs) play a crucial role. Recent empirical studies carried out by Görg and Kersting (2016) and Donaubauer et al. (2016) found, among others, that:

Well-developed financial markets, either in source or host countries, foster bilateral foreign direct investment. Well-developed financial markets in source countries compensate for poorly developed financial systems […]

KCG Studies about Standards along the Global Supply Chains

24th November 2016
KCG Secretary
A new KCG study (Görg et al., forthcoming) addressing multinational enterprises (MNEs) with production sites in Africa shows that MNEs are indeed able to influence the working and production conditions of their suppliers in Africa, if the MNEs are motivated to do so. For example, production conditions of MNEs are found to be established in a more sustainable way in Africa, if their products were exported to developed countries such as to Europe or the USA, compared to having been exported to less developed countries like China[…]