ABSTRACT
In many economies an important sub-group of large industrial enterprises are under foreign control. This chapter sets out the characteristics of foreign-owned manufacturing activities in various countries and puts forward a number of reasons for expecting the spatial behaviour of foreign-owned large industrial enterprises to differ from that of similar indigenous concerns. It presents very important limitations to the evidence. First, while most countries record the employment in plants owned by foreign firms, they rarely distinguish between the sizes of either the owned or owning firm. Second, in comparing foreign and indigenous firms the data are not available in a sufficiently disaggregated form to allow for structural differences between the two groups to be taken into account. The evidence relating to both material and information links is rather limited, primarily because the majority of linkage studies have failed to distinguish between foreign and indigenous enterprises.
