Determinants Of Foreign Direct Investment

Using a dataset which breaks down FDI flows into primary, secondary and tertiary sector investments and a GMM dynamic approach to address concerns about endogeneity, the paper analyzes various macroeconomic, developmental, and institutional/qualitative determinants of FDI in a sample of emerging market and developed economies. While FDI flows into the primary sector show little dependence on any of these variables, secondary and tertiary sector investments are affected in different ways by countries’ income levels and exchange rate valuation, as well as development indicators such as financial depth and school enrollment, and institutional factors such as judicial independence and labor market flexibility. Finally, we find that the effect of these factors often differs between advanced and emerging economies.

During the 1990s, the governments of South Asian countries acted as ‘facilitators’ to attract FDI. As a result, the inflow of FDI increased. However, to become an attractive FDI destination as China, Singapore, or Brazil, South Asia has to improve the local conditions of doing business. This book, based on research that blends theory, empirical evidence, and policy, asks and attempts to answer a few core questions relevant to FDI policy in South Asian countries: Which major reforms have succeeded? What are the factors that influence FDI inflows? What has been the impact of FDI on macroeconomic performance? Which policy priorities/reforms needed to boost FDI are pending? These questions and answers should interest policy makers, academics, and all those interested in FDI in the South Asian region and in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Pakistan.

"Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (with coursework component) December 2005."

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2019 in the subject Business economics - Investment and Finance, grade: 1,3, LMU Munich (Institut für marktorientierte Unternehmensführung), language: English, abstract: Both the drivers and effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) are complex and multifaceted. This thesis provides a conceptual overview of a selection of the most frequently considered drivers and economic effects of FDI in literature. The overview aims to support host countries in providing targeted incentives to attract FDI by raising the awareness of controllable drivers. Drivers for selecting a specific host country are presented hierarchically according to their controllability by the host country. The governance infrastructure as a driver, for instance, is easier to control by the target country than market characteristics, cultural distance, or resource endowments. This thesis discusses the drivers according to their decreasing controllability, starting with political factors, followed by economic, social, and cultural, as well as geographical factors. The reasons why these factors may attract FDI are outlined in the respective subsections. Moreover, this overview presents the economic effects of FDI on the host country. These effects include increased competition or spillover effects from foreign to local companies. The composition of direct and indirect effects leads to the conclusion that all these effects impact economic growth, which represents both a driver and an effect of FDI simultaneously. Thus, this thesis refers to the dependencies between drivers and effects with their interrelated factor economic growth. Further, it is argued that the effects of FDI are significantly interdependent among each other. Therefore, the realization of specific effects, such as economic growth, strongly depends on conditions and specific characteristics, such as the particular threshold level of human capital in the host country.

References pp. 20-23.