This paper examines the reasons for the impact of Buckley and Casson's The Future of the Multinational Enterprise (1976) on research in international business (IB). Earlier work concentrated on ownership-specific advantages or locational determinants rather than the central concept of internalization. The few exceptions were incomplete or not well known. Internalization as applied to the MNE spread rapidly because of the appeal to IB researchers of an analytically powerful idea that was based on institutional economics and involved an accessible methodology. The spread was also helped by the parallel growth of transaction costs in the domestic theory of the firm, and the publication activity of the authors and their associates.

Attempts to measure the spillover effects of multinational enterprises on host countries have generally been cross-sectional and limited to labour productivity in manufacturing for a single country. Recent work in growth theory has measured the extent to which growth in total factor productivity in a country depends not only on domestic R&D capital stocks but also on foreign R&D capital stocks. This paper extends such work by adding foreign direct investment stocks to foreign trade as a channel linking total factor productivity levels between countries. This is done by considering the role of trade and FDI as diffusion channels for G6 R&D to the OECD countries. There are three main results: the coefficient estimates for FDI are higher than those for trade in the standard model; the importance of the trade channel is much reduced once FDI is included; and the overall spillovers increase significantly with the inclusion of FDI.