| Summary: | 博士 === 國立政治大學 === 國際經營與貿易研究所 === 97 === Foreign direct investment has played an increasingly important role in the world economy and, as a consequence, an immense amount of research has investigated its determinants and effects. However, while previous studies have focused on the impact of inward FDI on the host countries, there has been relatively little research on the impact of outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) on the home countries in general, and on developing economies (LDCs) in particular. To fill this gap in the literature, this thesis investigates the home-country effects of the OFDI activity of Taiwanese manufacturing firms. To be specific, the impact of OFDI on the investing firms’ domestic R&D spending, productivity and efficiency, employment and skill-upgrading is examined.
A theoretical model is developed to examine the relationship between OFDI and domestic R&D activity. It is shown that OFDI could induce two opposing effects on domestic R&D spending, namely, a complementary effect and a substitution effect. The complementary effect arises mainly due to the “sales-increasing effect” of overseas investment. Substitution effects might arise from different channels depending on FDI motives.
Firm-level panel data covering the period 1987-2003 are used in the empirical analysis. The novelty in this thesis is the application of a propensity score matching approach combined with the difference-in-differences method to control for the possible selection bias related to the empirical analysis. Four different matching methods are used to construct matched samples of Taiwan’s OFDI firms.
The empirical results reveal that, although Taiwanese overseas investment, especially the investment in LDCs, reduces domestic employment, it stimulates investing firms’ domestic R&D spending, technology efficiency and skill intensity. This implies that while the OFDI activity of Taiwanese firms has brought about a positive effect on their technological upgrading, which is beneficial to the industrial development and resource allocation of the economy, the recent increase in the unemployment in Taiwan could to some extent be attributed to the OFDI activity. It also suggests that the Taiwanese government might need to reconsider its industrial policy as well as social welfare policy in order to deal with these new economic issues.
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