Exports, Foreign Direct Investments and Productivity: Are Services Firms Different?

Joachim Wagner ()

No 6009, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper contributes to the literature on international firm activities and firm performance by providing the first evidence on the link of productivity and both exports and foreign direct investment (fdi) in services firms from a highly developed country. It uses unique new data from Germany - one of the leading actors on the world market for services - that merge information from regular surveys and from a one-time special purpose survey performed by the Statistical Offices. Descriptive statistics, parametric and non-parametric statistical tests and regression analyses (with and without explicitly taking differences along the conditional productivity distribution and firms with extreme values, or outliers, into account) indicate that the productivity pecking order found in numerous studies using data for firms from manufacturing industries – where the firms with the highest productivity engage in fdi while the least productive firms serve the home market only and the productivity of exporting firms is in between – does not exist among firms from services industries. In line with the theoretical model and the empirical results for software firms from India provided by Bhattacharya, Patnaik and Shah (2010) there is evidence that firms with fdi are less productive than firms that export.

Keywords: exports; productivity; services firms; foreign direct investments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F14 F21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2011-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff, nep-ifn and nep-int
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published - published in: Service Industries Journal, 2014, 34 (1), 24-37

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Related works:
Journal Article: Exports, foreign direct investments and productivity: are services firms different? (2014)
Working Paper: Exports, Foreign Direct Investments and Productivity: Are Services Firms different? (2011)
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