Abstract

This paper studies productivity convergence to the regional and national frontiers among manufacturing firms in India, using panel data over the period 1999 to 2010. We find evidence that lagging firms converge to their national and regional frontiers, with faster speed of convergence to the national frontier than to their regional frontier. We extend our analysis to explore how firms’ participation in foreign markets (through exporting and investing abroad) affects the process of convergence. Our results suggest a ranking of firms’ speed of convergence based on their level of international engagement through exports, with non-exporters converging faster to their technological frontiers, followed by non-continuous exporters, and finally by continuous exporters. These results suggest that more established exporters are closer to the technological frontier and therefore have less scope to catch up than their less persistent counterparts and non-exporting firms. However, we did not find significant differences in the speed of convergence amongst exporting firms that have moved to the next stage of globalisation by investing abroad.

摘要

本文使用 1999 年至 2010 年期间的面板数据研究了印度制造业企业生产力向区域和国家前沿的收敛。我们发现有证据表明落后企业向国家和地区前沿收敛，向国家前沿收敛的速度更快而不是他们的区域边界。我们将分析扩展到探索企业参与国外市场（通过出口和海外投资）如何影响趋同过程。我们的研究结果表明，根据企业通过出口的国际参与程度对企业的收敛速度进行排名，非出口国向其技术前沿收敛得更快，其次是非连续出口国，最后是连续出口国。这些结果表明，较成熟的出口商更接近技术前沿，因此与不那么持久的同行和非出口公司相比，追赶的余地更小。然而，我们没有发现通过海外投资进入全球化下一阶段的出口公司之间的融合速度存在显着差异。