Adapting The Knowledge-capitalmodel Of The Multinational enterprise To Trade And Investment in Business Services

摘要

Trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) in business services has received a lot of attention from economists, politicians and business journalists. It is not quite clear why this is the case, but we suspect that there is a concern about the loss of skilled and semi-skilled white-collar jobs to developing countries. There was a certain level of controversy and resistance to low-skilled manufacturing jobs being offshored, but the potential loss of skilled jobs in information technology to foreign workers is an even greater perceived threat to workers in developed countries. It is indeed the case that trade and FDI in business service have increased greatly in the last few years. Statistics are presented in Table 1 and will be discussed more below. It is also clear that much of the increased activity is mediated by multinational firms, whether through actual FDI (we measure sales of foreign affiliates) or intra-firm trade between parent and affiliate.