Date of Submission

5-28-1998

Date of Award

5-28-1999

Institute Name (Publisher)

Indian Statistical Institute

Document Type

Doctoral Thesis

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Subject Name

Quantitative Economics

Department

Economic Research Unit (ERU-Kolkata)

Supervisor

Marjit, Sugata (ERU-Kolkata; ISI)

Abstract (Summary of the Work)

Economic development is a continuous process of improvement and upgradation of the existing technological knowledge and their applications. This can be done in more than one way. Countries can acquire superior knowledge through a risky process of self-financed indigenous innovation. This may, however, been proved to be an expensive and time consuming process. Direct and indirect import of technologies are other ways of getting advanced knowledge. Technological change that has been taking place in most of the developing countries is partly the result of import of technologies from the industrially advanced economies. Multinational companies (MNCS) may potentially act as agents in transferring knowledge from the developed to developing countries. Generally they transfer their superior technologies through licensing & contracts, through joint ventures (JVs) with firms of developing countries or through fully owned foreign subsidiaries.There is a vast literature dealing with foreign direct investment and multinationals (see, Ethier, 1986, Rugman, 1986, Horstmann and Markusen, 1987a, 1987b, Caves, 1996, etc.). While these works are mainly concerned with the problems of informational asymmetry and/or the existence of some firm-specific assets, some researchers have examined the incentives for foreign direct investment when there are transaction costs associated with arm's length arrangements such as licensing. Rugman (1981, 1986) provides specific discussions on this issue while Williamson (1981) gives a more general view. One can find a nice survey on this topic in Markusen (1995). Though these works focus on arm's length arrangements such as licensing and on the fully owned foreign subsidiaries, the analytical literature on foreign investment, surprisingly, pays relatively little attention to another important organizational form of foreign investment, known as international JV. International JV is a frequently observed form of foreign investment visible in the developing countries (see, Hladik, 1985, Beamish, 1988, Korbin, 1988, etc.).

Comments

ProQuest Collection ID: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqm&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:28843711

Control Number

ISILib-TH163

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

DOI

http://dspace.isical.ac.in:8080/jspui/handle/10263/2146

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