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Foreign Ownership, Microelectronic Technology and Skills: Evidence for British Establishments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2020

Dirk Willem te Velde
Dirk Willem te Velde*
Affiliation:
Overseas Development Institute, III Westminster Bridge Road, London, SEI 7JD
*
e-mails: dw.tevelde@odi.org.uk
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Abstract

This paper uses the Workplace Employee Relations Survey panel for 1990–1998 to investigate the relationship between foreign ownership, skill-structure and use of microelectronic technologies in British establishments. We find that foreign-owned establishments are early adopters of new microelectronic technologies and employ more non-manual workers (more senior technical professional workers, less skilled manual workers). Because foreign-owned establishments are early adopters of new technology, an increase in foreign ownership can partly explain a recent improvement in the relative position of skilled workers in Britain.

Type
Articles
Information
National Institute Economic Review , Volume 185 , July 2003 , pp. 93 - 106
Copyright
Copyright © 2003 National Institute of Economic and Social Research

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Footnotes

∗

I thank Prof. Ron Smith for having supervised this as chapter 5 of my doctoral dissertation at Birkbeck College, an anonymous referee, and former NIESR colleagues for useful comments and suggestions, in particular John Forth, Simon Kirby and Neil Millward for introducing me to the WERS database. I also thank participants at the 2nd Workplace Employee Relations Survey meeting held at NIESR, March 2001 and at the 28th Annual Conference of the European Association for Research in Industrial Economics, August 2001, Dublin. The author acknowledges the Department of Trade and Industry, the Economic and Social Research Council, the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service and the Policy Studies Institute as the originators of the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey data, and the Data Archive at the University of Essex as the distributor of the data. None of these organisations bears any responsibility for the authors analysis and interpretations of the data. Any errors remain mine. Comments can be sent to dw.tevelde@odi.org.uk

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