PUBLICATIONS & REPORTS

Contents Introduction

This paper examines the correlations of between shares of foreign multinational enterprises

(MNEs) in Thai manufacturing industries and energy efficiency in local Thai plants using data on medium-large plants from the industrial census for 2006. At the industry level, descriptive statistics suggested that MNE presence was negatively correlated with energy intensities in local plants. However, after accounting for the influences of plant-level factor usage and technical characteristics, correlations between MNE presence and energy intensities in local plants were generally positive. In other words, the econometric evidence presented here suggests that MNE presence generally leads local plants to be less energy intensive. However, this result is not robust and depends critically on the sample of industries examined, the level of aggregation used when defining MNE shares, and the variable (labor or output) used to measure MNE shares.