The Benefits of Foreign Investment in Canada, 1950 to 1956

Abstract

During the 1950's and 1960's the high level of foreign investment in Canada has provoked a continuing public debate, but for the most part the controversy has raged unrestrained by any quantitative information on the potential benefit of foreign capital. The lack of data is understandable, for in attempting an estimate one encounters a multitude of conceptual and empirical problems that militate against any sort of precision.Although it is impossible to be exact, I believe that the importance of the problem warrants making some rough guesses, and that is the task of this paper. My tools will be crude and there will be many compromises with reality, but by choosing my assumptions so that they impart an upward bias to my estimates, I can at least attempt to establish an upper bound to the true benefit of foreign investment. Even if the numerical estimates are not too reliable, making them forces us to separate the many issues related to the problem and to speculate on their relative importance.It must be noted initially that the models of this paper consider only the benefits conferred by the inflow of real resources financed by foreign capitalists, and they do not take account of the technical knowledge and skilled personnel often accompanying direct foreign investment. My first model assumes that some new knowledge is implemented by foreign investment, but no more than would be implemented by the same amount of domestic investment. I consider neither the possibility that the technical change associated with foreign investment proceeds at a faster pace than that associated with domestic investment, nor the possibility that techniques introduced by foreigners have external effects. I take this narrow approach not only because it would be virtually impossible to isolate the impact of technical change introduced by foreigners but also because I do not think that foreign investment is necessary to the international transmission of technical information.