Foreign Ownership and Productivity in the United Kingdom—Some Issues When Using the ARD Establishment Level Data

Richard Harris ()

Scottish Journal of Political Economy, 2002, vol. 49, issue 3, 318-335

Abstract: In a recent paper, Griffith (1999) reviews the scope and usefulness of the recently released micro data underlying the UK Annual Census of Production (the ARD). In particular, she produces estimates of the Cobb–Douglas production function that show that foreign owned establishments in the motor vehicle industry do not have higher levels of productivity, after taking account of different levels of factor inputs. This is an important result, since much recent work has suggested that multinational firms have a significant impact on productivity and technical progress in host countries. However, there are a number of issues that can be raised regarding the Griffith study and which are important in any work involving the ARD. Firstly, there are problems with the raw data used since a significant number of establishments have been omitted. Secondly, Griffith uses unweighted data and therefore her parameter estimates are not representative of the underlying population of establishments operating in the UK motor vehicle industry. There is also an issue of whether plant level data should be used as opposed to establishment data. Finally, and most importantly, I do find that foreign–owned plants are significantly more productive than UK–owned plants, when using the same econometric approach as that adopted by Griffith. For comparative purposes, the analysis is extended beyond motor vehicles to include the next four largest and most important foreign–owned sectors in UK manufacturing.

Date: 2002
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (35)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9485.00234

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:bla:scotjp:v:49:y:2002:i:3:p:318-335

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0036-9292

Access Statistics for this article

Scottish Journal of Political Economy is currently edited by Tim Barmby, Andrew Hughes-Hallett and Campbell Leith

More articles in Scottish Journal of Political Economy from Scottish Economic Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().