Relative treatment of aliens: how level is the playing field for foreign firms in developing countries?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article provides the first systematic analysis of whether developing country governments treat foreign firms better, worse or the same as domestic firms. We use a novel econometric estimator to analyze the World Bank’s Enterprise Surveys. In contrast to the intuition in much of the literature on the political economy of foreign investment, we show that foreign firms are not treated worse by host state governments on average. Also, whereas governments in low-income countries treat all firms poorly, they treat foreign firms relatively better than comparable domestic firms. This contrasting pattern means that the findings of the large and growing literature on the cross-country causes and consequences of the absolute treatment of foreign firms cannot be transferred to the question of relative treatment. It also has important policy implications—for instance in the context of investment treaties, which grant extensive property right protections to foreign but not domestic investors.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it