This book provides a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and economic growth, with special attention to the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Within a new semi-endogenous growth model, the book illustrates the impact of FDI on economic growth for every stage of development of a country. The book analyzes the growth enhancing effect of FDI, and explains the actual growth contributions induced by FDI.

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.

This paper studies growth determinants in 12 Latin American countries during the period 1950-85. In a simple growth accounting framework, the share of labor in income is found to be lower in the sample group than in developed countries, while factor productivity growth accounts for a larger proportion of growth in the fastest growing countries in the sample. Using panel data, macroeconomic stability is found to play, in addition to investment (physical and human), a crucial role in growth. To a lesser extent, growth is negatively correlated with government consumption and political instability. The terms of trade appear to have no significant effect on growth.

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.

Provides a comprehensive review of the issues related to the impact of FDI on development as well as to the policies needed to maximise the benefits.

This book presents the results of a groundbreaking study on ‘spillovers’ of knowledge and technology from global value-chain oriented foreign direct investment (FDI) in Sub-Saharan Africa, and discusses implications for policymakers hoping to harness the power of FDI for economic development.

The increased mobility and volume of international capital flows is a striking trend in international finance. While countries worldwide have engaged in financial deregulation, nowhere is this pattern more pronounced than in East Asia, where it has affected in unanticipated ways the behavior of exchange rates, interest rates, and capital flows. In these thirteen essays, American and Asian scholars analyze the effects of financial deregulation and integration on East Asian markets. Topics covered include the roles of the United States and Japan in trading with Asian countries, macroeconomic policy implications of export-led growth in Korea and Taiwan, the effects of foreign direct investment in China, and the impact of financial liberalization in Japan, Korea, and Singapore. Demonstrating the complexity of financial deregulation and the challenges it poses for policy makers, this volume provides an excellent picture of the overall status of East Asian financial markets for scholars in international finance and Asian economic development.