Foreign Direct Investment and the Chinese Economy provides a comprehensive overview of the impact of foreign direct investment, with extensive empirical evidence, on the Chinese economy over the last three and a half decades.

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.

The international flow of long-term private capital has increased dramatically in the 1990s. In fact, many policymakers now consider private foreign capital to be an essential resource for the acceleration of economic growth. This volume focuses attention on the microeconomic determinants and effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) in the East Asian region, allowing researchers to explore the overall structure of FDI, to offer case studies of individual countries, and to consider their insights, both general and particular, within the context of current economic theory.

This volume examines the impact on economic performance of structural policies-policies that increase the role of market forces and competition in the economy, while maintaining appropriate regulatory frameworks. The results reflect a new dataset covering reforms of domestic product markets, international trade, the domestic financial sector, and the external capital account, in 91 developed and developing countries. Among the key results of this study, the authors find that real and financial reforms (and, in particular, domestic financial liberalization, trade liberalization, and agricultural liberalization) boost income growth. However, growth effects differ significantly across alternative reform sequencing strategies: a trade-before-capital-account strategy achieves better outcomes than the reverse, or even than a "big bang"; also, liberalizing the domestic financial sector together with the external capital account is growth-enhancing, provided the economy is relatively open to international trade. Finally, relatively liberalized domestic financial sectors enhance the economy's resilience, reducing output costs from adverse terms-of-trade and interest-rate shocks; increased credit availability is one of the key mechanisms.

We test the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on economic growth in a cross-country regression framework, utilizing data on FDI flows from industrial countries to 69 developing countries over the last two decades. Our results suggest that FDI is an important vehicle for the transfer of technology, contributing relatively more to growth than domestic investment. However, the higher productivity of FDI holds only when the host country has a minimum threshold stock of human capital. In addition, FDI has the effect of increasing total investment in the economy more than one for one, which suggests the predominance of complementarity effects with domestic firms.

Drawing on good practices from OECD and non-OECD countries, the Framework proposes a set of questions for governments to consider in ten policy fields as critically important for the quality of a country’s environment for investment.

Central to the question of how to promote economic growth in Latin America is the role different types of regimes play in determining economic performance. Guardians of the Nation? challenges conventional wisdom regarding the expected advantages of military rule for economic growth. Glen Biglaiser explains why many military regimes in Latin America have not performed noticeably better than their democratic counterparts. Biglaiser argues that economic policy-making under military regimes is essentially an unintended by-product of the military's strategy to retain power. Using this premise, he examines the economic performance of regimes in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. Biglaiser shows that the appointment of neoliberal economists occurred not because military rulers possessed inherent interest in following market-oriented policies, but because they saw the appointments as a way to solidify their power. Biglaiser's study also depicts Pinochet's one-man rule as unique vis-à-vis the military regimes in Argentina and Uruguay. He concludes by demonstrating that his study is also applicable for understanding economic policy choice under democratic rule, and by comparing the similarities and differences between presidential and parliamentary governments.