2020 |
Reurink, A; Garcia-Bernardo, J Competing for capitals: the great fragmentation of the firm and varieties of FDI attraction profiles in the European Union Journal Article In: Review of International Political Economy, 2020. Links | BibTeX | Tags: FDI, FDI attraction profiles, foreign direct investment, Great fragmentation, holding companies, multinational corporation, tax, tax competition @article{Reurink2020, |
2019 |
Babic, M; Garcia-Bernardo, J; Heemskerk, E M The rise of transnational state capital: state-led foreign investment in the 21st century Journal Article In: Review of International Political Economy, vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 433-475, 2019. Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: corporate power, foreign direct investment, Globalization, Ownership, state capitalism @article{Babic2019db,Cross-border state-led investment is a recently rising, but understudied phenomenon of the global political economy. Existing research employs an anecdotal and case-oriented perspective that does not engage in a systemic, large-scale analysis of this rise of transnational state investment and its consequences for the transformation of state power in 21st century capitalism. We take a first step at filling this gap and offer two original contributions: Conceptually, we operationalize transnational foreign state-led investment on the basis of weighted ownership ties. These state capital ties are created by states as investors in corporations around the world. Empirically, we demonstrate our approach by setting up and analyzing the largest dataset on transnational state capital up to date. We show which different outward strategies states as owners employ and classify states according to their relative positions within the global network of transnational state capital. Our results illustrate a crucial aspect of the ongoing transformation of state power and sovereignty within globalization and we demonstrate how a careful and data-driven approach is able to identify different pathways and dimensions of this transformation. |
2018 |
Reurink, A; Garcia-Bernardo, J Competing with whom? For what? And how? The great fragmentation of the firm, FDI attraction profiles, and the structure of international tax competition in the European Union Journal Article Forthcoming In: SocArXiv-preprint, Forthcoming. Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: foreign direct investment, tax competition @article{reurinkgarcia2019,International tax competition is generally framed as states competing for foreign direct investment (FDI), and analyses of the phenomenon draw heavily on FDI statistics. In and of themselves, however, FDI statistics are merely a quantification of the value of investment projects and tell us little about the heterogeneity of these projects and the distinct patterns of competitive dynamics between countries they generate. In this article, we create a more sophisticated understanding of international tax competition by pointing out its variegated nature. To do so, we introduce the notion of the “great fragmentation of the firm” to distinguish between five categories of FDI: manufacturing affiliates, shared service centers, R&D facilities, intermediate holding companies and top holding companies. Using a novel combination of firm-level and country-level data, we identify for each of these different categories of FDI which European Union member states are most successful in attracting it, what macro-institutional and tax arrangements they use to do so, and what benefits they receive from it in terms of tax revenues and employment creation. In this way we were able to identify five distinct FDI attraction profiles and show that, rather than being a game of all against all, tax competition in the European Union increasingly takes place amongst subsets of countries that compete for similar categories of FDI. |