Like it or not? How the economic and institutional environment shapes individual attitudes towards multinational enterprises

This paper analyses the determinants of people's attitudes towards foreign direct investment (FDI) using a survey‐based data set that covers a wide range of rich and poor countries. We find that both individual socioeconomic characteristics and macroeconomic and institutional factors shape agents’ attitudes towards multinational firms. Moreover, we find that the influence of an individual's characteristics—such as education and the status as an entrepreneur—on her/his perspective on multinationals depends on the respective country's per‐capita income. Our results confirm the conjecture that relative individual attitudes towards multinationals reflect distributional interests as suggested by economic theory.