SEREN ÖZSOY

This paper investigates whether inflows of FDI and innovative activities act as a channel of knowledge spillovers in improving quality of countries' output. In measuring export quality, sophistication of a country's export basket is utilized. Utilizing panel data of countries for the period 2002-2015 and applying GMM methodology, the results indicate that the level of financial development, the quality of human capital and globalization of a country have a determinant role on the relation between knowledge spillover channels and the quality of exports. Patent applications generally positively affect sophistication of exports. FDI serves as a channel for knowledge spillovers to benefit the sophistication level of exports only for developed, more educated, financially developed and globalized countries.

This study argues that easy access to new information using information and communication technologies (ICT) will bring both more technological development and information about new markets, together catalyzing high technology (high-tech) production. This paper aims to show the impact of digitalization on the technology intensity of export. We use the ICT Development Index (IDI) as a proxy for the digitalization level of a country and the value of the exports of high-tech products as a proxy for the technology intensity of export. IDI comprises three components, including ICT access, usage and skills. These statistics reflect the ICT development of the country. To analyze the relevant relationship, we use panel data on countries between 2007 and 2017. The system-generalized method of moments (system GMM) dynamic panel estimator is utilized in the estimations, permitting us to control for potential endogeneity problems between the main dependent and independent variables. Results show that in developing countries, IDI has a significant effect on the export of high-tech products. In addition, the significance of the main components of IDI varies. These results suggest that developing countries striving to increase the export of high-tech products should invest more in ICT.

This study aims to reveal whether financial development and regulatory efficiency have a noteworthy role in developing countries ‘relationship between foreign direct investment and export of high-tech products. Rich panel data from 70 developing countries for the period 2002-2015 are used in the analysis to examine the relevant relationship. The Generalized Moments Method (GMM) is utilized in the study, since it allows to control the endogeneity relationship between variables. Findings shows that financial development and regulatory quality level affect the contribution of FDI on exports of high-tech products in developing countries. According to results, in countries where regulatory quality and financial development level are higher, FDI may contributes positively to export of high technology products. However, it couldn’t be found any significant relationship for countries which have less regulatory quality and financial development level.

Background: It is observed, in the studies on the factors affecting productivity and performance of the firms, that foreign firms are more successful than domestic firms thanks to their advantages of technological know-how, easy access to capital and modern management practices. Based on these findings, this study aims to measure the efficiency and performance of the companies in transportation and storage sector, which has an increasing share in the GDP of countries, with other industry-specific variables such as nationality and freight volume which are not in the literature.

Methods: To reveal the determinants of the freight volume and efficiency of the transportation and storage sector, the study employs Fixed Effect Model for analyzing the aggregate data of the companies in 30 European countries obtained from Eurostat from 2008 to 2018.

Results: The main findings in this study indicate that foreign controlled enterprises make a significant difference in terms of both efficiency and freight volume in the sector compared to domestic firms. The empirical results also suggest that investment in tangible goods and apparent productivity of labor serve as factors that are effective on both international and national freight volume. However, we have not found out any evidence for an impact of national enterprises on international and national freight volume.

Conclusions: The study shows the importance of nationality of the companies, loaded national and international transportation and apparent labor productivity as the determinants of freight volume and efficiency of the transportation and storage sector. The future researches can extend this study by conducting a firm level analysis.

This study aims to investigate whether Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) inflows and innovative activities act as a knowledge spillover channel that increases the logistics performance of countries. In the analysis, the effects of these activities on the logistics performance were questioned according to the development levels of countries and six different logistics performance indicators by the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) Estimator method. The estimation results show that FDI, R&D investments and patent applications, which are considered as the knowledge spillover channels, have a statistically significant and positive effect on the logistics performance of countries. In addition, it is concluded that this effect is higher in developing countries compared to developed ones.