How do Firms' Outward FDI Strategies Relate to their Activity at Home? Empirical Evidence for the UK

摘要

This study has investigated the outward investment strategies of UK multinationals and how these relate to their behaviour at home by making comparisons across plants owned by different types of firms and undertaking different geographic outward investments. For both business services and manufacturing sectors, I find a positive relationship between TFP and the geographic scale of multinational firms' overseas investment activity, suggesting that the most productive firms are those able to incur substantial fixed costs of investing in a number of different countries and that sorting into multinational status on the basis of productivity extends to the worldwide scope of operations.