In this paper, we examine in detail 35 final assembly location decisions to gain understanding of the manufacturing location decision from strategy and economic policy perspectives. We are particularly interested in the decision to locate final assembly specifically in a high‐cost (high GDP per capita) environment. In contrast with the earlier literature, we focus not just on manufacturing activities themselves, but also the key linkages between production, market, supply chain, and product development. These linkages are examined using three key concepts from theories of organization design: formalization, specificity, and coupling. Using these concepts, an analysis of the micro‐structure of each case reveals important commonalities that inform our understanding of location decisions. We conclude by discussing the policy implications of our findings.
Factors determining the diffusion of digital mobile telephony across 200 developed and developing countries in the 1990s are studied with the aid of a Gompertz model. The market size and network effects are found to play more important roles in the developing countries; there is also more need for complementing innovations in, for example, financial and payment systems. Even though the developing countries have disadvantages, being late entrants in digital mobile telephony is to their advantage and promotes cross-country convergence. Overall digital technologies are best seen as equalizers, and thus the divide is rather socio-economic or analog than digital.
An employer-employee panel is used to study whether the movement of workers across firms is a channel of unintended diffusion of R&D-generated knowledge. Somewhat surprisingly, hiring workers from others' R&D labs to one's own does not seem to be a significant spillover channel. Hiring workers previously in R&D to one's non-R&D activities, however, boosts both productivity and profitability. This is interpreted as evidence that these workers transmit knowledge that can be readily copied and implemented without much additional R&D effort.
The characteristics of product and process innovators among Finnish manufacturing firms with Community Innovation Survey (CIS) data are studied. Results of bivariate probit estimations suggest that, while the product and process innovations are related, they are largely driven by different factors. The ability to benefit from inward spillovers is the only variable having a symmetric effect onboth types of innovation. Cooperation with non-academic outside partners is the only other variable that becomes significant in both equations. Process innovations benefit from capital embodied technology, whereas product innovations require disembodied forms of technology.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.