Cross-border M&A outflows and government size

ABSTRACT

This article examines the effect of cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&A) outflows on government size in home countries. We focus on up to 89 developed and developing economies during the period 1996–2018. The results show that cross-border M&A outflows decrease the government size in total sample as well as in sub-samples of developed and developing countries. The results are stable across different econometric specifications and provide support to the efficiency hypothesis.

KEYWORDS:

• Cross-border mergers and acquisitions outflows
• government size
• panel data
• efficiency Hypothesis

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• F21
• H10

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ https://unctad.org/en/Pages/DIAE/World%20Investment%20Report/Annexe-Tables.aspx.

² https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/dataset/world-development-indicators

³ http://databank.worldbank.org/data/views/variableselection/selectvariables.aspx?source = worldwide-overnance-indicators.

⁴ The developed countries are Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom and United States.

⁵ The developing countries included are Argentina, Bahrain, Belize, Botswana, Brazil, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Egypt, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Korea Republic of, Kuwait, Lebanon, Macao, Malaysia, Mauritius, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Qatar, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Seychelles, Singapore, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, Uruguay, Venezuela Bolivarian Republic of, Viet Nam, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

⁶ Results are largely consistent.

⁷ See Doytch and Uctum (2011) for the application of system GMM estimation and robustness.

⁸ To save the space, the results of the control variables are not reported here.