Trade and Private R&D in Mexico

Liliana Meza González and Ana Belén Mora Yague

DEGIT Conference Papers from DEGIT, Dynamics, Economic Growth, and International Trade

Abstract: Using the National Survey on Employment, Wages, Technology and Training (Enestyc), this paper tries to find the relationship between increasing trade and the proportion of total income Mexican manufacturing firms invest on R&D. Based on two cross-sectional and a panel estimation procedures, the results confirm the idea that increasing the exposure to foreign markets affect the innovative efforts of Mexican firms. We also find that the firms engaging in some kind of R&D do not conform a random sample. More specifically, our results show that, in 1992, the probability of finding a firm engaging resources in some kind of R&D increased with size, a market diversification measure, and a measure of industrial market power at a 2-digit level, while the intensity of the R&D effort depended, on market power and an industry concentration measure. For the 1999 estimation our results show that the probability of R&D investment at a firm level increased with size, a market diversification measure, and exposure to foreign competition, while the magnitude of the R&D effort of a firm was determined by the decrease in average import tariffs at the industry level and by the exporting efforts of the firm. We find strong complementarities between public and private innovation efforts in both years, but find that younger firms are doing stronger R&D efforts in 1999. The 1992- 99 balanced panel results show that exporting firms invest more in R&D while import competing firms invest less, once size, market power and other control variables are taken into account. Our estimation indicates that exporting give firms a great incentive to innovate, and that not only large, but also small firms contribute to the R&D efforts of a nation.

Keywords: R&D; trade liberalization; foreign direct investment; exposure to foreing markets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30pages JEL Classification:
Date: 2005-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-int, nep-ipr, nep-pr~ and nep-mic
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://degit.sam.sdu.dk/papers/degit_10/C010_019.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to degit.sam.sdu.dk:80 (No such host is known. )

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:deg:conpap:c010_019

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in DEGIT Conference Papers from DEGIT, Dynamics, Economic Growth, and International Trade Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jan Pedersen ().