Ownership structure and new product development in transnational corporations in China

This paper examines the relationship between the ownership structure and new product development (NPD) at the affiliates of transnational corporations in China. Seven research hypotheses are tested on a panel data set covering 10,000 manufacturing firms with foreign involvement for the period 1998-2001. The results from probit and tobit models show that contractual joint ventures, equity joint ventures and joint stock enterprises are better organizational forms than wholly owned enterprises for increasing both the probability and intensity of NPD. We also find that ventures with OECD participation are more likely to be involved in NPD than those with participation by “overseas” Chinese TNCs

Do local manufacturing firms benefit from transactional linkages with multinational enterprises in China?

This paper examines the linkage effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) on firm-level productivity in Chinese manufacturing. It is found that FDI generates positive vertical linkage effects in Chinese manufacturing at both the national and regional levels, and limited positive horizontal spillovers at the regional level. While OECD firms gain from both vertical and (probably) horizontal linkages, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwanese firms benefit only from backward linkage effects. In the domestic sector, in which we are most interested, both state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and non-SOEs are hurt by competition from foreign firms in the same industries. While SOEs gain from vertical linkages with foreign firms, non-SOEs are unable to do so. The patterns of productivity spillovers from FDI in Chinese manufacturing seem to be determined by one key factor – the technological capabilities of the firms involved. Important data limitations and policy implications of this research are discussed

Local sourcing of multinational enterprises in China

Purpose – Local sourcing from indigenous firms by multinational enterprises (MNEs) is an important channel through which the former may benefit from the positive externalities generated by the latter. The purpose of this study is to analyze the extent and determinants of local sourcing of MNEs. Design/methodology/approach – Employing a survey dataset covering 493 multinational subsidiaries in China during 1999-2005, this paper applies the two-limit Tobit model. Findings – It is found that an MNE's local sourcing decision is influenced by its strategies, characteristics such as size and learning ability and country-of-origin. More specifically, export-orientation strategy, joint venture strategy and networking with local suppliers positively affect local sourcing. Small and autonomous subsidiaries tend to source more locally. Age has a non-linear effect. The importance of these determinants varies with regions. Research limitations/implications – Aiming at capacity building and competitiveness of indigenous firms, the Chinese government has initiated local content requirement. This study shows that such policy intervention could be counterproductive. The creation of a more competitive business environment by the government could promote more linkages. Originality/value – Given its critical role in economic development, local sourcing by MNEs has attracted much attention. Only limited research has been carried out on FDI linkage effects in China, and the location effect on FDI linkages has not been examined. This study aims to fill the gap by using Chinese survey data

Effect of false flax oilcake in thermophilic biogas production

False flax oilcake has been found to be suitable for anaerobic fermentation in mixtures with cattle slurry and straw. In organic farms, digestion of cattle dung and wheat straw with 8 % dry matter content mixed with 5 % of total material weight false flax oilcake is a feasible option for utilizing false flax oilcake to produce farm-own renewable energy and offering farm-own high nitrogen (ammonia) content fertilizer (2.48 g kg-1 wet wt). In field digesters, the biogas yield of 8 % dry matter pure material under thermophilic condition was 0.24 l g-1 VS fed. The biogas yield could be increased by mixing 5 % false flax oilcake to get 0.37 l g-1 VS fed and a VS conversion efficiency with 0.83 l g-1 VS destroyed. Under laboratory controlled conditions, the biogas yield of slurry with 0.5 % oilcake was a little higher than biogas yield of the digestion of pure material, which was 0.26 and 0.24 l g-1 VS fed, respectively. Compared with the field experiment, only small amounts of biogas were produced in the lab-scale when 5 % oilcake was mixed in. The mixing can improve the biogas yield and substrate reduction in the digesters which have sufficient material. Further research is needed to find out the best controlled conditions (high-efficient bacteria, mixing frequency and time) and best equipment (for example: two phases digesters)

Macroecological Patterns of Climatic Niche Breadth Variation in Lacertid Lizards

Measuring climatic niche position and breadth may help to determine where species can occur over space and time. Using GIS-based and phylogenetic comparative methods, we investigated global patterns of variation in climatic niche breadth in lacertid lizards to test the following three hypotheses about climatic niche widths. First, does a species’ temperature or precipitation niche breadth relate to its temperature or precipitation niche position (the mean value of annual mean temperature or annual precipitation across sampled localities in the range of each species)? Second, are there trade-offs between a species’ temperature niche breadth and precipitation niche breadth? Third, does a species’ temperature or precipitation niche breadth relate to altitude or latitude? We expect that: (1) species distributed in cold regions are specialized for low-temperature environments (i.e. narrow niche breadth center around low temperatures); (2) a negative relationship between species niche breadth on temperature and precipitation axes according to the trade-off hypothesis (i.e. species that tolerate a broad range of precipitation regimes cannot also tolerate a broad range of temperatures); (3) precipitation niche breadth decreases with altitude or latitude, whereas temperature climatic niche breadth increases with altitude or latitude. Based on the analytical results we found that: (1) temperature niche breadth and position are negatively related, while precipitation niche breadth and position are positively related; (2) there is no trade-off between temperature and precipitation niche breadths; and (3) temperature niche breadth and latitude/altitude are positively related, but precipitation niche breadth and latitude/altitude are not significantly related. Our results show many similarities with previous studies on climatic niche widths reported for amphibians and lizards, which provide further evidence that such macroecological patterns of variation in climatic niche breadths may be widespread

Improving transferability of 3D adversarial attacks with scale and shear transformations

Previous work has shown that 3D point cloud classifiers can be vulnerable to adversarial examples. However, most of the existing methods are aimed at white-box attacks, where the parameters and other information of the classifiers are known in the attack, which is unrealistic for real-world applications. In order to improve the attack performance of the black-box classifiers, the research community generally uses the transfer-based black-box attack. However, the transferability of current 3D attacks is still relatively low. To this end, this paper proposes Scale and Shear (SS) Attack to generate 3D adversarial examples with strong transferability. Specifically, we randomly scale or shear the input point cloud, so that the attack will not overfit the white-box model, thereby improving the transferability of the attack. Extensive experiments show that the SS attack proposed in this paper can be seamlessly combined with the existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) 3D point cloud attack methods to form more powerful attack methods, and the SS attack improves the transferability over 3.6 times compare to the baseline. Moreover, while substantially outperforming the baseline methods, the SS attack achieves SOTA transferability under various defenses. Our code will be available online at https://github.com/cuge1995/SS-attackComment: 10 page

Market Orientation, Embeddedness and the Autonomy and Performance of Multinational Subsidiaries in an Emerging Economy

This paper develops a conceptual framework for market orientation, embeddedness, autonomy and performance of multinational subsidiaries in an emerging economy. We argue that internal and external embeddedness has different performance implications for export- and local market-oriented multinational subsidiaries. Our results, based on a sample of 233 multinational subsidiaries from China, indicate that while external embeddedness has a positive impact on specialized resources of both types of subsidiary, such resources only positively affect the performance of local market-oriented subsidiaries. By contrast, internal embeddedness has a negative impact on specialized resources of both types of subsidiary. Managerial and policy implications are discussed

Does outward FDI generate higher productivity for emerging economy MNEs? – micro-level evidence from Chinese manufacturing firms

This paper investigates whether emerging economy multinational enterprises (EMEs) that undertake outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) become more productive, controlling for the self-selection into the global investment market. Particularly, we focus on the moderating effects of firm heterogeneity on the OFDI-productivity nexus. A theoretical framework incorporating the resource-based views and institutional theory is established and the propensity-score matching and difference-in-difference (DID) approaches are combined to test the framework, utilizing unique data on Chinese manufacturing firms over the sample period 2002–2008. We find that EMEs turn to be generally more productive after they conduct OFDI, but this productivity effect varies depending on the parent firm and investment strategy heterogeneity. Our results suggest that EMEs without state ownership but with stronger absorptive capability gain higher and more sustainable productivity effects and such gains are higher for EMEs investing in OECD than in non-OECD countries. Policy and managerial implications are discussed