Foreign direct investment and forward hedging

This paper examines the behavior of a risk-averse multinational firm (MNF) making investment in a foreign country under exchange rate uncertainty. To hedge the exchange rate risk, the MNF has access to an unbiased currency forward market. Foreign direct investment (FDI) is irreversible and sequential in that the MNF can acquire additional capital after the exchange rate uncertainty is completely resolved. The MNF as such possesses a real (call) option that is rationally exercised whenever the foreign currency has been substantially appreciated relative to the domestic currency. We show that the MNF's optimal initial level of sequential FDI is always lower than that of lumpy FDI, while the expected optimal aggregate level of sequential FDI can be higher or lower than that of lumpy FDI. We further show that the presence of the currency forward market improves the MNF's incentives to make FDI, both ex-ante and ex-post.     

Foreign direct investment and employment: host country experience

This study investigates the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on employment creation and wages in Ghana. A simultaneous panel regression model is used in estimating the effect FDI has on employment and wages. The results of this study indicate that FDI has a statistically significant and positive effect on employment levels in Ghana, but has an insignificant effect on wages. FDI can greatly augment domestic efforts by creating more jobs in the economy. The results clearly demonstrate that FDI flows affect employment quantitatively, but not necessarily qualitatively. The study identifies other factors including, productivity, wages, sub-sector, and location as important in influencing employment levels. Also, productivity, labour union, firm size, sub-sector, and location are noted as significant in affecting wages in Ghana. The main value of this paper is in respect of the fact that it provides insight into the effects of FDI flow on employment from a host country perspective. The study recommends that FDI should be considered as an integral part of the Ghanaian economic policy in order to spur on economic growth.     

Foreign direct investment and trade: The case of Vietnam

By making use of a gravity model, this paper examines the impact of FDI on exports, imports and net export of Vietnam. The empirical analysis presented in this paper is based on a recently released panel dataset involving Vietnam's 19 major trading partners for the period 1990-2007. The paper also considers the impact of FDI on trade during three sub-periods: the pre-Asian financial crisis, the post-Asian financial crisis and during the Asian financial crisis period. The empirical analysis reveals that a complementary relationship exists between FDI and exports and FDI and imports. While the impact of FDI on net-exports is insignificant during the full sample period, a significant positive relationship exists between net-exports and FDI in the post-Asian financial crisis period.     

Foreign direct investment in Mexico Determinants and its effect on income inequality

By conducting panel data analysis across 32 federal entities in Mexico over the period 1994-2006, this paper studies the determinants of foreign direct investment (FDI) and its effect on income inequality within and between regions. We observe that the level of development and the size of the market have a direct relationship with FDI and therefore, they tend to increase the inequality gap between regions, but there is no evidence suggesting that it creates inequality within them.     

论外商直接投资对我国进出口贸易的影响

实证分析得出：外商直接投资有力地促进了中国进出口贸易总量的增长和进出口产品结构的优化，从进出口比例来讲，外商直接投资对出口的影响大于对进口的影响，以至于顺差成为我们关注的理论和实际问题。     

The impact of tax incentives on foreign direct investment in China

Scholes and Wolfson 1989, Scholes and Wolfson 1992) argue that tax rules jointly influence investment decisions and organizational form. The present research uses Chinese data to test these assertions. Specifically, our study investigates whether (1) the creation of special tax incentive zones is an effective tax policy for China to induce new foreign direct investment (FDI) into specific regions, and (2) changes in the tax rules influence the particular form of foreign direct investment selected: equity joint ventures, contractual joint ventures, and wholly foreign-owned enterprises. Our results indicate that tax incentives are effective in attracting FDI to China, and moreover, influence the selection of a particular form of FDI. One limitation of our study is that we were unable to completely control for the correlated-omitted-variable problem.     

Herding in foreign direct investment

This paper, to our knowledge, is the first to examine herding in foreign direct investment (FDI). We investigate it from two perspectives, first the number of countries investing in the host country and then the dollar volumes of those investments. Our results provide strong evidence of herding in FDI. We also show herding in the divestures of these investors. We show that herding in FDI is related to host country characteristics and governance parameters.     

Foreign direct investment,financial development,and economic growth: the case of Malaysia

The paper presents the text of a lecture given at the Bank of England in December 2005 as the first in a series of lectures in memory of John Flemming. It provides a personal view of what the profession has learnt about currency unions as a result of the establishment and operation of the European Monetary Union. It argues that the salience of business cycle concurrence as a criterion for participation is probably less than used to be understood and for some countries borders on irrelevance. In any case the effects of union upon business cycle concurrence are themselves not obvious. It also appears that, after a period in which very large estimates of the trade effect of currency unions were widespread, more modest estimates are in order. The most unlooked-for effect is probably that which has occurred in the financial markets; country premia within the EMU are very small, offering a means for insurance against asymmetric shocks. Finally, the lessons of another, local, experiment in currency union is examined. But the useful lessons from this experiment (Ecco L'Euro) are found to be limited.     

Foreign direct investment,exports and economic growth: ADRL and causality analysis for South Africa

The article empirically investigated economic growth as a function of foreign direct investment and exports in South Africa. The article applied the autoregressive distributed lag model, known as the ARDL bounds testing approach to cointegration for the long run relationship between economic growth, foreign direct investment and exports. The error correction model was used to examine the short run dynamics; and the VECM Granger causality approach was used to investigate the direction of causality. The article confirmed cointegration between economic growth, foreign direct investment and exports. The article indicates that both foreign direct investment and exports spur economic growth contrary to some studies, which found that FDI does not cause economic growth. The VECM Granger causality analysis found unidirectional causality between economic growth and foreign direct investment running from foreign direct investment to economic growth, unidirectional causality between foreign direct investment and exports running from foreign direct investment to exports and bidirectional causality between economic growth and exports. The article confirms the FDI-led growth hypothesis for South Africa. On the policy front, the government could stimulate foreign direct investment through incentives to investors, creation of a good macroeconomic environment and a careful utilisation of loose monetary policy to grow the economy.     

外商对华直接投资的经济增长效应分析

随着中国经济的平稳和快速增长,外商对华直接投资呈现出不断增长的趋势。就外商对华直接投资的经济效应而言,FDI与GDP的增长率高度吻合。FDI对我国宏观经济的多个变量都产生了深远的影响,并且FDI通过影响这些变量,进而增加了国民收入水平,促进了经济增长。     

Foreign direct investment,foreign trade and environment: New evidence from simultaneous-equation system of gravity models

Since the early 90s, after the implementation of various regulatory multinational agreements, debates about the impacts of environmental quality on international trade and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) have been increased considerably. This article tackles this issue for 14 home countries and 39 host countries for 6 Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) over the period 1990–2011 by using gravity models. We also used simultaneous-equation system of gravity models in order to investigate the two-way linkages between trade and FDI in the presence of environmental degradation. Our main findings suggest that the impact of the environmental degradation on trade is negative and significant only for the static estimation. However, the impact of the environmental degradation on FDI is negative and insignificant for both static and dynamic estimations. The results also show that there exists a unidirectional causal relationship running from trade to FDI.     

Anti profit-shifting rules and foreign direct investment

This paper explores the effects of unilateral tax provisions aimed at restricting multinationals’ tax planning on foreign direct investment (FDI). Using a unique dataset which allows us to observe the worldwide activities of a large panel of multinational firms, we test how limitations of interest tax deductibility, so-called thin-capitalization rules, and regulations of transfer pricing by the host country affect investment and employment of foreign subsidiaries. The results indicate that introducing a typical thin-capitalization rule or making it more tight exerts significant adverse effects on FDI and employment in high-tax countries. Moreover, in countries that impose thin-capitalization rules, the tax-rate sensitivity of FDI is increased. Regulations of transfer pricing, however, are not found to exert significant effects on FDI or employment.     

Taxation and foreign direct investment (FDI): empirical evidence from a quasi-experiment in China

China’s new Corporate Income Tax Law was passed in March 2007 and took effect on January 1 2008. It terminates the dual corporate income tax regime by removing the preferential tax treatments offered to foreign investment enterprises (FIEs) and unifies the corporate income tax regime for FIEs and Chinese domestic enterprises (DEs). This paper uses a difference-in-differences approach to determine whether FIEs are responding to the law by reducing their investment in China. Employing the Chinese Industrial Enterprises Database (2002～2008) to implement the analysis, we find that: (1) FIEs are responding to the law by reducing their investment in China; and (2) the magnitude of the response is larger for HongKong-Macau-Taiwan (HMT) investment enterprises than that for other FIEs, which supports the claim that some Chinese investors engaged in “roundtripping” FDI. Our confidence in the conclusions are further boosted by the results of a series of placebo tests and two robustness checks: (1) the results of the placebo tests support the claim that the estimated effect is due to the tax reform rather than to other confounding factors; (2) the results of the first robustness check are consistent with the perception that State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) might enjoy more favorable treatments from the Chinese government than Private-Owned Enterprises (POEs); and (3) the results of the second robustness check show that incorporating enterprise-specific time trends into the baseline specification of our econometric models does not change the conclusions.     

外资盯上中国核电"奶酪"

中国经济的强劲走势，带来用电持续高涨；同时，也带来了严峻的能源紧张问题。进入2004年，全国19个省市煤炭供给全线告急，各地纷纷拉闸限电！     

Bilateral investment treaties and foreign direct investment: Evidence from emerging market firms

Bilateral investment treaties (BITs) help developing countries attract foreign direct investment (FDI) from developed countries. However, whether BITs matter for emerging market firms’ (EMFs) FDI is unclear. This paper investigates how BITs affect EMFs’ FDI locations using conditional logit models with firm-level panel data from 2003 to 2015. The results show that BITs can help host countries attract FDI from emerging market countries. BITs work alongside good institutions to increase the attractiveness of FDI, irrespective of a host country being developed or not.     

Bilateral effective tax rates and foreign direct investment

This paper computes effective (marginal and average) tax rates that account for bilateral aspects of taxation and, therefore, vary across country-pairs and years. These tax rates serve to estimate the impact of corporate taxation on outbound stocks of bilateral foreign direct investment (FDI) among OECD countries between 1991 and 2002. The findings indicate that outbound FDI is positively related to the parent and host country tax burden and negatively associated with bilateral effective tax rates. Relying only on unilateral (country and time variant) rather than on both unilateral and bilateral (country-pair and time variant) effective tax rates leads to biased estimates of the impact of corporate taxation on FDI.     

Convergence of accounting standards and foreign direct investment

Since the development of the eclectic paradigm by Dunning (1977, 1988, 1993), many studies have investigated different forms of location advantages that attract foreign direct investment (FDI). In this study, we consider accounting standards as a component of the institutional infrastructure of a location and hypothesize that the convergence of domestic and International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) promotes FDI as it reduces information processing costs for foreign investors.² We also hypothesize that the effect of reduced information costs is stronger for partner countries whose accounting systems showed greater pre-convergence differences because they magnify the facilitating role of accounting standard convergence for FDI. Using bilateral FDI data from 30 OECD countries between 2000 and 2005, we find evidence generally consistent with these hypotheses.     

外商直接投资新动向

2005年单月下降幅度较大,但全年实际利用外资基本持平 这几年我国吸引外商直接投资出现持续正增长,2004年达到606.30亿美元的最高水平,但2005年,这一增长趋势稍微放缓,比上年同期略有下降.2005年全国新设立外商投资企业44001家,同比增长0.77%;实际使用外资金额603.25亿美元,同比下降0.5%.