U.S. Multinational Activity Abroad and U.S. Jobs: Substitutes or Complements?

Ann Harrison, Margaret S. McMillan and Clair Null

Chapter 10 in Globalization, Firms, and Workers, 2022, pp 235-253 from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.

Abstract: Critics of globalization claim that firms are being driven by the prospects of cheaper labor and lower labor standards to shift employment abroad. Yet the evidence, beyond anecdotes, is slim. This paper reports stylized facts on the activities of U.S. multinationals at home and abroad for the years 1977 to 1999. We focus on firms in manufacturing and services, two sectors that have received extensive media attention for supposedly exporting jobs. Using firm-level data collected by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) in Washington, D.C., we report correlations between U.S. multinational employment at home and abroad. Preliminary evidence based on the operations of these multinationals suggests that the sign of the correlation depends on the crucial distinction between affiliates in high-income and low-income countries. For affiliates in high-income countries there is a positive correlation between jobs at home and abroad, suggesting that foreign employment of U.S. multinationals is complementary to domestic employment. For firms that operate in developing countries, employment has been cut in the United States, and affiliate employment has increased. To account for firm size, substitution across firms and entry and exit, we aggregate our data to the industry level. This exercise reveals that the observed “complementarity” between U.S. and foreign jobs has been driven largely by a contraction across all manufacturing sectors. It also reveals that foreign employment in developing countries has substituted for U.S. employment in several highly visible industries, including computers, electronics, and transportation. The fact that there were U.S. jobs lost to foreign affiliates in key sectors, despite broad complementarity in hiring and firing decisions between U.S. parents and their affiliates, helps explain why economists view the impact of globalization on U.S. jobs as benign despite negative news coverage for declining industries.

Keywords: Globalization; Trade Reform; Foreign Direct Investment; Labour Markets; Employment; Wages; Offshoring; Innovation; Credit Constraints; Industrial Policy; Labour Rights Activism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F02 F6 F63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Working Paper: US multinational activity abroad and US jobs: substitutes or complements? (2006)
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