FDI and trade—Two-way linkages?

We investigate the intertemporal linkages between foreign direct investment and disaggregated measures of international trade. We outline a model exemplifying these linkages, describe methods for investigating two-way feedbacks between various categories of trade, and apply them to recent data. We find that the strongest feedback between the sub-accounts is between FDI and manufacturing trade. For the first time, we decompose causality using Geweke's [Geweke, J. (1982). Measurement of linear dependence and feedback between multiple time series. Journal of the American Statistical Association 77(378), 304–313] decomposition method. We find that most of the linear feedback between trade and FDI can be accounted for by Granger-causality from FDI gross flows to trade openness (50%) and from trade to FDI (31%).