Essays on technology spillovers, trade, and productivity (Korea, Taiwan, China)

This thesis deals with the channels of international technology spillovers and productivity performance of Korean and Taiwanese manufacturing. In Chapter 2, as one of chapters on the former, the empirical results show that medium-high technology is the major source of technology diffusion in the South, and high technology is more important in the North. Second, the role of high technology in R&D spillovers becomes larger with higher per capita income. These findings suggest that stage of development matters in the type of technology transfer.; Chapter 3 deals with the role of intellectual property rights (IPR) in technology transfer through foreign direct investment (FDI), using an instrumental variable method. In the first stage, this chapter finds an inverse U-shaped relation between FDI and IPR index. In the second stage, we observe international technology spillovers through FDI, and adding IPR protection index as an instrumental variable improves the regression results.; Chapter 4 examines the effects of both R&D spillovers and trade patterns on productivity in Korean manufacturing, using industry-level data. Our results show that domestic and foreign R&D capital stocks are positively associated with productivity growth of Korean manufacturing over the period 1976–96, and that foreign R&D capital stock has stronger effect than domestic R&D in improving the total factor productivity of Korean manufacturing. Moreover, productivity is greater in export and in the more open industries, and the effects of foreign R&D capital are greater in the industries with large import shares or large intra-industry trade shares.; Chapter 5 compares productivity performances of Korean and Taiwanese manufacturing, using the Malmquist productivity index and its four components based on output-distance functions estimated by using category-wise cross-industry meta frontier. We find that the overall productivity and technology growth rates of Korea are lower than those of Taiwan, explaining postwar Korea's per capita GDP being less than that of Taiwan. At disaggregated levels, however, productivity performance of high-technology sector of Korean manufacturing is superior to that of Taiwan manufacturing, while traditional and basic sectors of Taiwan manufacturing achieved better productivity performance compared with those of Korean manufacturing.