Foreign Direct Investment, Ownership, and the Transfer of Technology

Using a survey of more than 1000 German investment projects in Central and Eastern Europe, this study analyses the strategies of international joint ventures. Their risks and, in particular, their innovative potential is investigated. As a statistical tool for the analysis of share equations the conditional Tobit model is introduced. The theoretical base is a continuous time, full information model of a joint venture. Surprisingly, sufficient and necessary conditions for joint venture instability and technology transfer can be derived. The survey is used to apply the introduced concepts and to demonstrate the validity of the approach empirically.

Autorentext

The Author: Ralph Leonhardt studied mathematics, business administration and economics in Berlin and Dresden from 1989 to 1997. After that he worked as a consultant at the Social Science Research Center (WZB) in Berlin on German subsidies. From 1998 to 2002 he was a leader of the data management group of the research project German Foreign Direct Investment in Central and Eastern Europe at the Economics Faculty at the University of Munich. He finished his doctoral thesis in 2003. Since 2003 Ralph Leonhardt works as a database statistician for a marketing research enterprise.

Inhalt

Contents: The Econometrics of Ownership Shares - Conditional Tobit Estimation - International Technology Transfer and the Joint Venture Lifecycle - Spillover and Joint Venture Instability - The Value of Transferred Knowlege - Policy Recommendations - Appendix.