This paper focuses on an unexamined area of trade—the behaviour of heterogeneous intermediate suppliers facing final producers of different ability and pursuing different strategies. To inform our empirical analysis, we develop a theoretical model to analyse the choice of an intermediate supplier between selling to domestic producers, selling to multinational producers and/or exporting to foreign producers. The model’s predictions are: (i) sufficiently productive firms self-select into supplying to multinationals or exporting, while the most productive firms pursue both strategies, and (ii) the order of preferred strategies between supplying to multinationals and exporting depends on foreign direct investment inflows and export set-up costs. The paper uses firm-level data with rare information about multinational suppliers from 29 countries in Europe and Central Asia in 2002 and 2005 to test these theoretical predictions. The empirical analysis confirms both of our model’s predictions. Moreover, it suggests that multinational suppliers are more likely to have higher required levels of ex-ante labour productivity than exporters, implying that exporting is easier and a more popular choice for firms.

本文着重于一个未经审查的贸易领域-异质中间供应商的行为面对最终制造商的不同能力和追求不同的策略。为了为我们的经验分析提供依据，我们开发了一个理论模型来分析在向国内生产商销售，向跨国生产商销售和/或向外国生产商出口之间选择中间供应商的选择。该模型的预测是：（i）具有足够生产能力的公司自行选择向跨国公司供应或出口，而生产效率最高的公司则同时采用这两种策略，并且（ii）在向跨国公司供应和出口之间的优先策略的顺序取决于外国直接投资。流入和出口设置成本。本文使用公司级数据以及2002年和2005年来自欧洲和中亚29个国家的跨国供应商的罕见信息来检验这些理论预测。实证分析证实了我们两个模型的预测。而且，这表明跨国供应商比出口商更有可能具有更高的事前劳动生产率要求，这意味着出口更容易，也成为企业更受欢迎的选择。