Foreign Direct Investment and Export Spillovers: How Do Export Platforms Fare?

Abstract

Should economies that promote themselves as export platforms for FDI be expected to experience relatively high levels of export spillovers from foreign to host-country enterprises? To investigate how export decisions of host-country enterprises are associated with the presence and export intensity of foreign-owned enterprises (FOEs) in an export-platform economy we use enterprise-level data for the manufacturing sector in Ireland. We postulate that export spillovers from FOEs are dependent upon the sectoral presence and export intensity of FOEs, so that third-country export-platform FDI may not result in positive export spillovers to host-country enterprises. We find that the decision by host-country enterprises to enter the export market is positively associated with the presence of FOEs in their sector. However, the export intensity of host-country enterprises is negatively associated with the export sales ratios of FOEs, a result that contrasts with evidence of positive FOE export intensity spillovers in most previous empirical studies.