اثر سرمایه گذاری مستقیم خارجی در جوامع محلی

Little evidence exists on the effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) on local communities in the United States, despite evidence that U.S. communities actively bid against each other for FDI. We use detailed county-level panel data from South Carolina across 5-year intervals from 1980 through 1995 to investigate the effect of foreign manufacturing plants on local labor markets and on the level and distribution of local government budgets. We find that foreign investment raises local real wages much more than does domestic investment, but lowers per capita county-government expenditures and redistributes monies away from public school expenditures.

The competition for new firm investment by state and local governments in the United States seems to be ever increasing. The amount and variety of state and local incentives to attract firms have progressed to include local property tax relief, free land, job tax credits, ‘‘enterprise zones’’ which give firms greater benefits for locating in economically depressed areas, *We thank Jan Brueckner, Eckhard Janeba, John List, Kei-Mu Yi, two anonymous referees, and session participants at the 1998 Winter Econometric Society meetings for helpful comments. We also thank the staff of the South Carolina State Library and Clarice Gray for their excellent research assistance. We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Oregon. Any errors or omissions are the sole responsibility of the authors.

This paper presents evidence that foreign investment has considerably different effects on local communities than does domestic investment. Using detailed data on foreign and domestic investment in South Carolina, across industries and counties and over time, we find that foreign plants tend to significantly increase wages paid to workers in an industry in a local community, but also lead to substantially lower per capita government budgets. Moreover, foreign investment apparently induces changes in local government budget allocations; specifically, we find evidence suggesting that communities experiencing relative increases in foreign investment tend to substitute from education spending to spending on transportation and public safety. We acknowledge that there are limitations to our analysis and results. For example, while our results show that the presence of foreign plants is associated with higher wages in the industry in a community, our results cannot identify whether this is due to foreign plants paying higher wages to a given worker, foreign plants using higher skilled workers who command higher pay, or some alternative explanation. Likewise, while foreign plant presence is associated with lower per capita budgets, we have not directly tested whether offered tax incentives are the source of this result. Nevertheless, our results point to substantial differences in how foreign manufacturing plants affect local communities vs domestic ones.