تجزیه و تحلیل بخشی از سرمایه گذاری مستقیم خارجی و رشد اقتصادی در کشورهای توسعه یافته

Empirical studies on foreign direct investment (FDI) and growth in developed countries have yielded conflicting results using cross-country regressions. We use sectoral data for a group of six country members of the OECD. Our paper is the first to identify the sector-specific impact of FDI on growth in the developed countries. Our results show that FDI has positive, or no statistically discernible, effect on economic growth directly and through its interaction with labor. Moreover, we find the effects seem to be very different across countries and economic sectors.

During the past two decades, foreign direct investment (FDI) has become increasingly important, with increasing volumes of direct investment flowing between and into the developed countries recently. The theoretical literature in economics identifies several channels through which FDI inflows are predicted to benefit the receiving economy. Yet, the empirical literature has lagged behind and has had more trouble identifying these advantages in practice. Most prominently, a large number of applied papers have looked at the FDI-growth nexus, but their findings have been far from conclusive.1 Notwithstanding the absence of any robust conclusions, most countries continue to vigorously pursue policies aimed at encouraging more FDI inflows.2 In this paper, we use an endogenous growth framework to estimate the impact of FDI on growth using sectoral data for the OECD member countries. Using an augmented production function, we let FDI directly affect GDP growth and also indirectly through its interaction with labor. This approach creates heteroskedasticity, and so feasible generalized least squares (FGLSs) are employed. The results show that FDI has a positive and statistically significant effect on economic growth operating both directly and indirectly through its interaction with labor. Interestingly, the effect is not equally distributed across economic sectors. Our paper contributes insights on the FDI-growth nexus in several ways. First, we employ a country-panel fixed effects regression-based approach that enables us to disregard variables that measure the time-invariant institutional, legal and cultural environment in which FDI projects are implemented and which may have an important impact on growth. These time-invariant institutional details are very difficult to quantify precisely, and our approach allows us to overcome this potential omitted-variables bias. Second, our paper is one of the very first to use data from different sectors to examine the sectoral differences in the impact of FDI on economic growth. This is potentially important since much of the recent theoretical and empirical micro-econometric literature concludes that FDI spillovers, if they exist, are found in intra-industry rather than in inter-industry settings.3 This finding further justifies our attempt to ask whether the impact of FDI on growth might be different for different sectors and to begin to investigate whether particular sectoral characteristics are conducive to a positive impact of FDI. Section 2 provides a brief survey on the state of current research on the growth effects of FDI. Section 3 presents our model and the data we use. Section 4 analyzes the empirical results, and Section 5 concludes.

Our results suggest that FDI has a significant and positive effect on economic growth both directly or through its interaction with labor. However, the effect is not equally distributed across countries and sectors, and its identification may depend on only a positive correlation between FDI and growth in a limited range of sectors. In some sectors, we find no evidence that FDI enhances economic growth. The main obstacle we faced in this paper is data. A comprehensive aggregate sectoral data is sorely lacking, even for the OECD member countries. While it is becoming apparent that the evidence for the beneficial role of FDI is strengthening, better data with wider coverage should make it feasible to examine many related questions. For example, the different impact of FDI across sectors, and the possible spillovers between sectors have not been thoroughly addressed here. Future work with more data should be able to shed a more precise light on the possibility that FDI in certain sectors is more productive in generating value added in the same sector, or even better, in other sectors.