Estrategias de los inversores en los nuevos miembros de la UE: aspectos microeconómicos, macroeconóm

Abstract

Since the late 1990s investors have been faced with new challenges due to changing locational characteristics in the Central European transition countries. Export demand became the main driving force of manufacturing FDI as opposed to local market capturing in earlier years. In addition, increasing production costs drove investors to relocate or upgrade their subsidiaries. Structural upgrading can be traced by blending various approaches and sources of information: microeconomic, sectoral and macro-economic. In the microeconomic approach we rely on findings of case studies showing the close connection between the competence of a subsidiary and its chances for upgrading. At the macro level, changes in the industrial distribution of FDI stocks is analysed. For further industrial characteristics we rely on a database comparing the performance of foreign investment enterprises and domestically owned enterprises. Changing distribution of foreign capital and employment by industry confirms that transnational companies located export oriented subsidiaries into lowcost central European transition countries during the 1990s. Later on they moved simple and low tech production, e.g. textile and clothing, further to the East and rarely upgraded their activity in the more advanced countries. Manufacturing FDI in the new members increasingly concentrated in the most internationalized industries like the automotive industry and electrical engineering which provide opportunity for upgrading and networking.