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How Much Does Foreign Capital Matter

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Abstract

This small note with a swollen Appendix illustrates how foreign ownership data and aggregate production function assumptions can be used to deduce what Canadian domestic output and national income might be if there were less foreign capital. The appendix spells out the calculation procedure, which depends heavily on the assumed ease with which labour can be substituted for capital in the production process. Consider first two extreme possibilities. On the one extreme, if there were no substitution possible between capital and labour, then any reduction in the stock of capital would lead to proportionate drops in output and employment. In this sort of world, anything that jeopardizes the inflow of capital required to finance the technically-necessary capital-labour ratio has high costs in terms of unemployment and foregone income. At the other extreme, if there is perfect substitution between capital and labour, and if foreign capital is paid the value of its marginal product, then changing the amount of foreign capital would have no effect on national income. Domestic output would drop if the foreign capital were not present, but the amount of the drop would be just equal to the amount of output formerly used to pay the return on the foreign capital. Somewhere between these two extremes lies the constant-returns CobbDouglas production function assumed in the present calculations. Under these assumptions, we need both capital and labour to get any output, but any combination of capital and labour can be usefully employed in cooperation. However, as labour is substituted for capital, the amount of extra labour required to replace one unit of capital increases as the amount of capital decreases. Under these conditions, therefore, it comes 1 The idea of using a Cobb-Douglas production function to estimate the consequences of less foreign investment is based on earlier work by Phil Neher. 2 The foreign ownership data and the assumed production function for business output have been developed as parts of the aggregate quarterly model RDX2. The theory, equations, and variables of the model are described in J. F. Helliwell, H. T. Shapiro, G. R. Sparks, I. A. Stewart, F. W. Gorbet, and D. R. Stephenson: The Structure of RDX2. Ottawa, Bank of Canada, 1971. (Bank of Canada Staff Research Studies, No. 7.)

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