Koen de backer

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) | OECD · Directorate for Science, Technology and Industry

The growing investment in robotics is an important aspect of the increasing digitalisation of economy. Economic research has begun to consider the role of robotics in modern economies, but the empirical analysis remains overall limited. The empirical evidence of effects of robotics on employment is mixed, as shown in the review in this chapter. The...

Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) play an important role in host countries’ domestic value chains as part of the global activities of these companies in GVCs. MNE affiliates create directly large volumes of output, value added, international trade and jobs, and in addition they generate also important indirect effects. Foreign affiliates in host cou...

Because of their numerous and large activities across different countries, Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) are believed to be central and dominant actors in the global economy. In addition, it has been argued that the growing fragmentation of production within global value chains (GVCs) in the past decades is largely driven by MNEs. It is remarkab...

Using the OECD analytical AMNE database, this paper provides new evidence on the services activities of multinational enterprises (MNEs) and discusses the relationship between cross-border trade in services and the production of services through foreign affiliates ("mode 3" trade in services in the General Agreement on Trade in Services). An econom...

In order to better understand the interdependencies between trade and investment in global value chains (GVCs), the OECD has developed a new dataset on the Activities of Multinational Enterprises (AMNE). This dataset starts from official AMNE statistics and combines the information with Inter-Country Input-Output (ICIO) tables to provide new insigh...

The rapid growth of global value chains (GVCs) has been an important driver of globalisation during the past decades. But the international fragmentation of production appears to have lost momentum and GVCs seem to have stalled in recent years. The world economy is facing a number of structural shifts that may dramatically change the outlook of GVC...

The news that companies in OECD economies are increasingly bringing manufacturing activities back home has attracted a lot of attention in recent years. Headline cases of a number of large multinational companies have given increased visibility to the phenomenon of reshoring in the economic press, academic research and policy discussions.. The deba...

World trade and production are increasingly structured around "global value chains" (GVCs). The last few years have witnessed a growing number of case studies describing at the product level how production is internationally fragmented, but there is little evidence at the aggregate level on the prevalence of GVCs. The main objective of this paper i...

The past decades have witnessed a rapid globalisation of economic activity which has significantly changed the outlook of the world economy. International production, trade and investments are increasingly organised within so-called global value chains (GVCs) where the different stages in the production process are located across different economie...

In analyzing firm productivity and efficiency in Belgium, this paper empirically shows that foreign firms are significantly more productive than domestic firms. Large differences in productivity between foreign firms and domestic firms exist even after controlling for other firm characteristics put forward by theoretical models formalizing heteroge...

The growing importance of global value chains (GVCs) in the international organisation of production increasingly challenges the traditional way of measuring countries’ export performance and hence international competitiveness. As a result of growing production fragmentation, a country’s export bundle nowadays incorporates imports of intermediate...

Openness has been shown to be an important driver of economic growth. Because of the broad character of the current globalisation process, openness has many dimensions: trade (in both goods and services), foreign direct investment (FDI), circulation of people (including the highly skilled), and internationalisation of R&D, technology and knowledge....

Firm-level micro-data have become increasingly important in OECD activities not only for econometric analysis that captures heterogeneity across enterprises but also in order to conduct different and more detailed types of data aggregation (e.g. by geographical unit, firm size, industry). This paper describes the development of the OECD ORBIS micro...

Confronted with increasing global competition and rising research and development (R&D) costs, companies can no longer survive on their own innovation efforts. Their innovation activities are increasingly international, and they are embracing more “open” approaches – collaborating with external partners, whether suppliers, customers or universities...

In recent years there has been growing interest in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and among many other national and international statistics institutes in making microdata more accessible to policy makers and analysts. This paper describes the common trends in microdata access in OECD countries using a 2006 survey...

One of the distinctive characteristics of the current globalisation process is the emergence of global value chains. Within global value chains and international production networks, not only are final goods traded internationally, but intermediate goods (parts and components) and, in recent years, services also increasingly are. This trend signifi...

L'une des principales caractéristiques de la mondialisation à l'oeuvre actuellement est l'émergence de chaînes de valeur mondiales. Le long de ces chaînes et à l'intérieur des réseaux de production internationaux, ce sont non seulement des biens finals qui font l'objet d'échanges internationaux, mais également de plus en plus des biens intermédiair...

Open innovation has received a lot of attention in the business management literature and recently also in policy discussions. Until now, most of the empirical evidence has been based on case study work offering detailed insights into some best practices of open innovation in companies’ innovation strategies. While existing large-scale data may off...

Global value chains are radically altering how goods and services are produced – parts made in one country, for instance, are increasingly assembled in another and sold in a third. The globalisation of production has changed the industrial structure within OECD countries, and in some sectors heavily affected their competitiveness. Another major con...

In analyzing firm productivity in Belgium, this article shows empirically that both scale and efficiency contribute positively to the typical productivity advantage of foreign affiliates. Stochastic production frontier estimation using the translog functional form indicates that foreign subsidiaries exploit economies of scale more fully and benefit...

In analyzing firm entry and exit across Belgian manufacturing industries, this paper presents evidence that import competition and foreign direct investment discourage entry and stimulate exit of domestic entrepreneurs. These results are in line with theoretical occupational choice models that predict foreign direct investment would crowd out domes...

In analyzing the distinctive contributions of foreign subsidiaries and domestic firms to productivity growth in Belgian manufacturing, this paper shows that foreign ownership is an important source of firm heterogeneity affecting productivity dynamics. Foreign firms are found to have contributed disproportionately to aggregate productivity growth w...

Multinational Firms, Market Integration, and Trade Structure: What Remains of the Standard-Goods Hypothesis? — In extending traditional empirical trade models to multinational firms, this paper shows the effect of the transfer of firm-specific technology and intangible assets by these firms on the structure of host countries. For Belgium, a small o...

In analyzing firm entry and exit in the small open economy of Belgium, this paper empirically shows that import competition and foreign direct investment crowd out domestic entrepreneurs on product and labor markets. These results are in line with theoretical models of entrepreneurial choice in open economies that have explicitly included the effec...

In extending traditional empirical trade models with multinational firms, this paper shows the effect of transferring firm specific technology on the trade structure of host countries. For Belgium, a small open economy with a large presence of multinational firms, this effect is of crucial importance and by neglecting it previous studies appeared t...

In dit artikel worden allianties die aangekondigd werden in de financiële pers over de periode 1986-1996, geanalyseerd en wordt meer specifiek nagegaan in welke mate allianties waar minimaal één Vlaamse of Belgische partner in actief was, verschillen van de totale steekproef. In het algemeen suggereert het belang van de productie- en distributie-al...

De ongelijke productiviteitsontwikkeling tussen industrie en diensten blijkt de belangrijkste verklaring te vormen voor het afnemend belang van de industriële sector in de totale werkgelegenheid van geïndustrialiseerde landen. Dit desindustrialisatieproces heeft zich over de periode 1970-1995 sterker doorgezet in België dan in andere Europese lande...

The theoretical IO literature has modeled the relationship between spillovers and cooperative (R&D)-agreements extensively; suggesting that spillovers induce cooperation as a means to internalize these involuntary effects, while cooperation simultaneously enhances voluntary spillovers through information sharing. The empirical literature on this to...