Masahiro Endoh: Dogan, Wong, and Yap's paper analyzes whether the presence of foreign firms in Malaysia has a positive or negative spillover effect on TFP of local firms. Results show that generally there is no positive spillover effect from foreign firms to domestic firms in the early 2000s in Malaysia, which corresponds with some previous research under the context of foreign countries. This might be a damper to proponents who want to build up a hospitable environment for incoming FDI as a method to vitalize the local economy. Still, it is valuable to accumulate the findings from empirical research such as this paper regarding the effect of inward FDI on host countries’ economy to assess the effectiveness and the worthiness of policies aimed at attracting FDI, which are adopted in many countries.
My comments are mainly two-fold. First of all, to achieve more robust results, the authors might have paid...