IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/buspol/v6y2004i01p1-24_00.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Regional Integration and Third-Country Inward Investment

Author

Listed:
  • Markusen, Jim

Abstract

The paper focuses on how the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which will include both high-income developed and developing countries, will affect the options and investment strategies of multinational firms outside the region. Preliminary sections discuss the strategies open to both insider firms (headquartered with the Americas) and outsider firms, and the characteristics of technologies and countries that determine equilibrium location choices. Then I turn more explicitly to the question at hand, and suggest that a free-trade area of the Americas can be conceptually decomposed into (a) integration among the southern developing countries and (b) integration between the south and NAFTA. The first will give third-country multinationals horizontal investment opportunities to serve the effectively larger southern market with local production to serve the local southern market. The second gives third-country multinationals the opportunity to exploit low labor costs in the south to produce for export to North America (export-platform FDI). While this all sounds attractive for third-country firms, the theory emphasizes that the same advantages of integration are conferred upon U.S. and Canadian firms who have the additional advantage of supplying services and intermediate goods to southern affiliates at lower cost than the third country firms. This competitive effect from insider firms leads the theory to suggest weaker benefits to third-country firms than a simpler approach might predict.

Suggested Citation

  • Markusen, Jim, 2004. "Regional Integration and Third-Country Inward Investment," Business and Politics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 6(1), pages 1-24, April.
  • Handle: RePEc:cup:buspol:v:6:y:2004:i:01:p:1-24_00
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S1369525800000863/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Nguyen-Huu, Thanh Tam & Nguyen-Khac, Minh, 2017. "Impacts of Export-platform FDI on the production of upstream industries - do third country size, trade agreements and local content requirement matter? Evidence from the Vietnamese supporting industri," Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal (2007-2020), Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel), vol. 11, pages 1-33.
    2. Nguyen-Huu, Thanh Tam & Nguyen-Khac, Minh, 2017. "Impacts of export-platform FDI on backward linkages - Do third country size, trade agreements and heterogeneity of firms matter? Evidence from the Vietnamese supporting industries," Economics Discussion Papers 2017-21, Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:buspol:v:6:y:2004:i:01:p:1-24_00. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/bap .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.