This paper offers an empirical assessment of the geographical scope of multinational activity at the world level. With this objective, we estimate scope elasticities, which is the relationship between the productivity of the parent firm and the probability of operating abroad in different markets through subsidiaries with the same main activity. Elasticities are estimated for a baseline cross-section of 35 home countries that represent more than 70% of total outward FDI investment at the world level. At the aggregate level, the results indicate quite consistently, through various estimation methods, that a 10% increase in the productivity of the parent firm increases the probability in a range between 0.8–1.0%. Elasticities for manufacturing more than double the elasticities for the service sector. The paper also explores the heterogeneity of scope elasticities across home countries and sectors. This heterogeneity is related to differences across bilateral home-host country characteristics such as the size of the potential host market, bilateral distance and other factors such as institutional quality of host countries and cultural closeness. The signs attached to some of these factors are in general consistent with the predictions of models of firm heterogeneity and FDI activity.

本文对世界范围内跨国活动的地理范围进行了实证评估。为此，我们估计范围弹性，即范围是母公司的生产率与通过具有相同主要活动的子公司在不同市场中在国外经营的可能性之间的关系。估计有35个母国的基准横截面的弹性，占世界水平上外国直接投资总投资的70％以上。从总体上看，结果通过各种估算方法一致地表明，母公司的生产率提高10％，则概率在0.8-1.0％之间。制造业的弹性是服务业的两倍以上。本文还探讨了本国和部门之间范围弹性的异质性。这种异质性与双边东道国特征之间的差异有关，例如潜在东道国市场的规模，双边距离以及其他因素，例如东道国的体制质量和文化亲密性。这些因素中的某些因素通常与企业异质性和FDI活动模型的预测一致。