Ownership Patterns of U.S. Joint Ventures Abroad and the Liberalization of Foreign Government Regulations in the 1980s: Evidence from the Benchmark Surveys

Data from the Benchmark Surveys of the Commerce Department show the beginning of a global liberalization in government restrictions on foreign equity in the 1980s. This was manifested in a small but unmistakable across-the-board reduction in the share of 50-50 and minority affiliates out of all U.S. affiliates in a country. Across countries there remains a huge variation in this proportion, and the second part of the paper seeks to statistically explain this variation in a cross-sectional regression analysis.