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This paper examines two sources of global knowledge spillovers: foreign direct investments and trade. Empirical evidence demonstrates that foreign direct investment and trade can contribute to overall domestic productivity growth only when the technology gap between domestic and foreign firms is not too large and when a sufficient absorptive capacity is available in domestic firms. The paper proposes the terms research and development and labor quality to capture the innovative and absorptive capacity of the country. The spillover effects in productivity are analyzed using a stochastic frontier approach. This productivity (in terms of total factor productivity) is decomposed using a generalized Malmquist output oriented index, in order to evaluate the specific effect in technical change, technical efficiency change, and scale efficiency change. Using country-level data for 16 Latin American countries for 1996-2006, the empirical analysis shows positive productivity spillovers from foreign direct investment and trade only when the country has absorptive capacity in terms of research and development. Foreign direct investment and trade spillovers are found to be positive and significant for scale efficiency change and total productivity factor change.

E-Business --- Economic Theory & Research --- Emerging Markets --- Foreign Direct Investment --- International Economics & Trade --- Labor Policies --- Malmquist index --- Public Sector Development --- Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) --- Technical Efficiency

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Increasingly, entrepreneurship is being discussed and considered as a source of high economic growth and competitiveness. A conceptual process of creative construction that characterizes the dynamics between entrants and incumbents can prove quite useful to analyze the impact of countries' entrepreneurship capital on economic performance and can be a guide for economic policy. This paper applies a Stochastic Frontier Analysis approach to test the hypothesis that entrepreneurship capital promotes economic performance by serving as a conduit of knowledge spillovers. In addition, kernel density functions are employed to analyze convergence (or divergence) in the efficiency estimated for individual countries. The empirical evidence and results here tend to support the hypothesis. Specifically, the empirical analysis shows that the rate of expenditure on research and development in relation to new businesses registered has a positive and significant effect in increasing technical efficiency. These factors facilitate the dissemination of existing knowledge, develop entrepreneurship capital, and thus provide the missing link to economic performance-entrepreneurship capital. The authors also show the trends and dynamics of changes in countries' technical efficiency.

Agricultural Knowledge & Information Systems --- E-Business --- Economic Theory & Research --- Entrepreneurship Capital --- Finance and Financial Sector Development --- Knowledge for Development --- Labor Policies --- Private Sector Development --- Stochastic Frontier Analysis (Sfa) --- Technical Efficiency