Industrial proximity and vertical integration of multinational firms Evidence from Korean firm-level data

Purpose - With the rise of foreign direct investment and global value chain, firms organize their plant allocation across countries to take advantage of production cost reduction opportunities and market access. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the production-supply strategies of Korean firms over foreign and domestic affiliates, using industrial proximity between Korean parent firms and their affiliates. Design/methodology/approach - In this paper first, using the Survey of Business Activities provided by Statistics Korea, the authors build a matching data set between a parent firm and each affiliate both in domestic and foreign countries. Second, the authors define their vertical relationship based on the input requirement coefficients of the Input-Output table (IO table). Furthermore, using the same IO table, the authors define the proximity for the pairs of the parent firm and the affiliates in domestic and foreign markets. Then, the authors test the relationship between the parent firm's choice for foreign affiliate and their proximity index. Findings - The main result shows that the stronger the industrial proximity between a final good producing firm and its input supplying affiliate is, the more likely the cross-border vertical integration is to be observed than the domestic vertical integration. Also, the authors find that the firms whose production structure accords the main result outperform and conduct more self-R&D and less R&D on trust than the other firms. Originality/value - The finding is novel and original in a sense that the authors showed for the first time at firm-level microdata evidence that there is an optimal pattern of organizing supply chains within a multinational firm.