Typology of multinationals in Austria: CESEE focus and foreign control as distinct features

Multinational enterprises (multinationals) play an important role in every economy as they tend to be larger, more capital- and R&D-intensive, more productive and more integrated in global value chains than domestic enterprises. Focusing on multinationals active in Austria, this paper discusses essentially two research questions: Can we categorize Austrian units of multinationals in consistent groups? And can these groups be characterized by meaningful variables? To address these questions, we undertake a microdata-linking exercise to build a comprehensive dataset of multinationals in Austria and use adequate clustering techniques to identify homogeneous and distinct groups without imposing any prior knowledge regarding the number of such groups or their features. This approach enables us to characterize more than 2,500 multinationals in Austria and meaningfully identify eight types of multinationals, the main grouping factors being (1) foreign or Austrian control, (2) special purpose entity versus other form of company, (3) the share of outward investment in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe (CESEE) and (4) the degree of trade openness. With this basic research work, we open up a wide range of questions that may serve as the basis for future (applied) analytical work