Regional foreign participation and externalities: new empirical evidence from Mexican regions

Recent empirical research on externalities from foreign direct investment (FDI) is engaged with the identification of externalities along the dimensions of industry and geographical space. In this paper I explore these externality dimensions in the context of estimating FDI externalities in regional Mexican manufacturing industries. The main findings indicate that the presence of FDI creates a variety of externality effects. Intraregional foreign participation creates negative intraindustry and positive interindustry externalities. Furthermore, the estimations identify negative intraindustry externalities across regions and positive spatial interindustry FDI externalities. In addition, the estimations identify three different regional characteristics that have a negative or positive effect on spatial externalities from FDI. © 2008 Pion Ltd and its Licensors.