سرمایه گذاری مستقیم خارجی، توسعه مالی و رشد اقتصادی: شواهد بین المللی

Previous studies have recognized that the benefits from foreign direct investment (FDI) to recipient countries can only be realized when those countries have reached a certain level of financial development. However, the dynamic interrelationships among FDI, financial development, and real output, including the long-run equilibrium as well as causality, have not been analyzed. This paper overcomes this major shortcoming by applying recent advances in panel cointegration and panel error correction models for a set of 37 countries using annual data for the period 1970-2002. For the first time, we explore the directions of causality among FDI, financial development, and economic growth and obtain solid, convincing evidence of a fairly strong long-run relationship. Furthermore, the financial development indicators have a larger effect on economic growth than does FDI. From the panel causality tests, while the evidence of a short-run relationship is weak, that of a long-run relationship among the variables is unequivocal. Overall, the findings underscore the potential gains associated with FDI when coupled with financial development in an increasingly global economy.

That there is a clear-cut connection between foreign direct investment (FDI) and economic growth has yet to be confirmed through empirical research. On the one hand, far too many studies have only focused on FDI at the expense of financial development. On the other hand, many studies have explored whether the level of financial development encourages growth while ignoring FDI. For the most part, previous studies have not taken into account the interactions between FDI and financial development, though some very recent research studies pertaining to the connections among FDI, financial development, and economic growth have made great strides. It is well known that FDI and domestic financial markets are important sources of capital investment funds for manufacturers, and because the substitutable or complementary relations between them are very important, this paper mainly focuses on the analysis of their interactive relations as well as their relation to economic growth. Levine (1997) drew attention to many other extremely effective functions of a developed financial system: exerting corporate control; mobilizing savings; reducing risk; allocating resources; monitoring managers; and facilitating the exchange of goods and services. Provided these functions are being carried out, it should be possible to alter an economy’s growth rate by affecting either the growth rate of capital stock or the rate of technological innovation

Table 1 presents the results from the panel unit root tests. At the 5% significance level, no matter if there is a time effect or not, the IPS and Hadri statistics provide strong evidence that the four series – LGDP, FDI, LIAB, and LEND – have a unit root, while just two statistics reject the unit root in the LLC test. A similar test also shows that all of the variables are of the I(1) process. Using these results, we proceed to test LGDP, FDI, and LIAB (or LEND) for cointegration to determine if there is a long-run relationship to control for in the econometric specifications (Model 1 and Model 2). We further modify Odedokun’s (1996) model as Output = f (FDI, Financial Development) and attempt to untangle the relationships in the FDI-finance-growth nexus. To conduct empirical tests on the effect of financial development on economic growth, Odedokun (1996) proposes a theoretical framework based on the conventional neo-classical, one-sector, aggregate production function in which financial development constitutes an input.