Why do foreign-owned firms in the UK have higher labour productivity?

Abstract

Foreign-owned firms in manufacturing have substantially higher labour productivity than domestically owned ones. This basic feature of the UK economy has been known for some time (Davies and Lyons, 1991). The UK is not unique in this respect: the same is true of countries such as the United States (Doms and Jensen, 1998) and Canada (Globerman etal ., 1994). For the UK, the productivity gap at the firm level has been documented by Oulton (1998b); similar findings are reported by Griffith (1999a, 1999b) and in the paper by Girma et al . in this volume.