R&D Activities in Affiliates of Swedish MNCs

The fact that multinational companies do not undertake all their research and development activities at home has become a matter of recent concern, both in the home and host countries of these companies. Some empirical work has been done on the question of why MNCs decentralize their R&D activities (see Mansfield et al, 1979; Lall, 1979a; Håkansson, 1980; and Hirschey and Caves, 1981).1 The study by Håkansson (1980) is one of the few that deal with the determinants of the R&D intensity of MNC affiliates, but it is confined to subsidiaries that carry out R&D, while foreign affiliates that do not are excluded.2 Furthermore, the analysis does not take into account the characteristics of the MNC to which the affiliates belong.