Technology spillovers from Foreign Direct Investment (FDI): the active role of MNC subsidiaries in Argentina in the 1990s
研究挑战了外国直接投资技术溢出中子公司被动接受技术的传统观点，提出子公司在东道国通过自身知识创造活动产生溢出潜力，并用1992-96年阿根廷工业企业数据验证了子公司技术活动对溢出过程的显著影响。
The usual perspective on technology spillovers from FDI sees the MNC subsidiary as a passive actor. It presumes that the technological superiority that spreads from subsidiaries to other firms in the host economy is initially created outside it by MNC parent companies, and is delivered to subsidiaries via international technology transfer. The role of subsidiaries is little more than to act as a ‘leaky container’ lying between the technology transfer pipeline and the absorption of spillovers by domestic firms. This paper suggests a different model in which a substantial part of the potential for spillover is created within local subsidiaries as a result of their own knowledge-creating and accumulating activities in the host economy. We explore empirically the effects of these activities on technology spillovers from FDI using data for industrial firms in Argentina over the period 1992–96. The analysis suggests that significant results can be obtained incorporating subsidiaries' own technological activities as an explanatory variable of the spillover process.