Abstract
Technological changes, globalisation and the increasing heterogeneity of firms populating Italian industrial districts (IDs) have deeply affected the fabric of these IDs. This chapter sheds light on the contribution of inward foreign direct investments (FDIs) to the host country’s skilled workforce, which is one of the most critical factors in IDs’ socio-economic resources. The chapter investigates whether, within the IDs, the labour workforce skills composition of affiliates of foreign multinational enterprises (MNEs) differs from that of uni-national firms. The analysis uses microdata from the Veneto NUTS-II region (Northeast Italy), as this is an economic area world-renowned for its manufacturing production and has historically been considered as a referential context for the Italian ID model. The results show that foreign affiliates of MNEs located in the Veneto IDs hire more skilled workers and more experienced workers (above 30 years old), as well as fewer foreign workers. This provides evidence of a positive impact of the presence of foreign affiliates of MNEs on the sustainability of IDs’ socio-economic fabric.
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Notes
- 1.
Uni-national firms are those firms that have never undertaken FDI abroad nor been acquired by foreign MNEs.
- 2.
According to Becattini (1990: 40), “Industrial districts are geographically defined productive systems, and in various ways, [involved] in the production of a homogeneous product, with different specialisations but interconnected with each other”.
- 3.
As industrial commons are a positive externality, two important aspects can be identified: (i) the existence of a social benefit arising from the fact that the company can draw on the assets of the local commons without payment and (ii) the absence of property rights, which may easily give rise to a market equilibrium lower than the social optimum. Depending on the types of local resource, the imbalance arising from their under-/over-exploitation may lead to the rapid disappearance of goods (Barzotto et al., 2016a).
- 4.
Pavitt’s (1984) classification is based on firms’ technological trajectories. Specifically, firms were considered to be in one of four categories: supplier-dominated, production-intensive (scale-intensive), production-intensive (specialist-suppliers) and science-based.
- 5.
The model was run in STATA14, using the nearest neighbour matching method (random draw version) with replacement and caliper (=0.01) and conditioning on common support.
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Acknowledgments
We gratefully acknowledge the support of Bruno Anastasia, Maurizio Gambuzza and Maurizio Resera of Veneto Lavoro in providing data on employment in the Veneto Region and thank them for supporting us in the data analysis. We are indebted to Marco Mutinelli for giving us access to the Reprint database and to Giancarlo Corò for his useful suggestions. The usual disclaimers apply.
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Barzotto, M., Mariotti, I. (2018). Inward FDI and Skilled Labour Force in Veneto Industrial Districts. In: Belussi, F., Hervas-Oliver, JL. (eds) Agglomeration and Firm Performance. Advances in Spatial Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90575-4_5
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