Export market participation, spillovers, and foreign direct investment in Australian food manufacturing

Generating a more outward looking sector has been one of the principal aims of agrifood policy in Australia for the past two decades. Australia's proximity to fast-growing economies of East Asia has been seen as a major source for export growth. Over the same time span, there has been an increase in foreign ownership in the food sector. Using a firm-level data set for 2005, we characterize the probability that a firm participates in exporting by a set of firm characteristics, including foreign ownership and spillovers from foreign-owned firms, and find that foreign ownership neither increases nor decreases the probability that a firm will be involved in exporting. [EconLit citations: Q170, Q130]. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.