• Country/Economy-based Data
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• Largest TNCs database
• Investment treaty database
• FDI performance and potential indices

There are some major changes in global FDI patterns that preceded the global crisis and that will most likely gain momentum in the short and medium term. Firstly, the relative weight of developing and transition economies as both destinations and sources of global FDI is expected to keep increasing. These economies, which absorbed almost half of FDI inflows in 2009, are leading the FDI recovery. Secondly, the recent further decline in manufacturing FDI, relative to that in the services and primary sectors, is unlikely to be reversed. Thirdly, in spite of its serious impact on FDI, the crisis has not halted the growing internationalization of production.
This year’s Report focuses on climate change, and in particular the role of transnational corporations. As enterprises with formidable knowledge, cutting-edge technology, and global reach, TNCs are necessarily among the primary actors in the global effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and shift towards a low-carbon economy. The Report stresses that with the right policy initiatives, incentives and regulatory framework, TNCs can and must contribute significantly to both mitigation and adaptation. It also proposes a global partnership to galvanize low-carbon investment and advocates concrete initiatives such as a new technical assistance centre to support policy formulation and implementation in developing countries.

• What are the differences between individual regions in terms of their responses in FDI flows to the crisis? Why did the crisis affect FDI to developing countries later than developed countries?
• What are the prospects for FDI in 2009 as well as for the medium term?
• How has the crisis affected national and international policies related to FDI? Has the path of more liberalizations been continued or reversed?
• In the midst of a major industrial restructuring, which companies are the winners and losers in the universe of the world´s largest TNCs?
• Why is agriculture such a special industry for developing countries - and what are its longer term prospects? What role can TNCs play in improving the productivity of agriculture in developing economies?
• How robust is the renewed interest by TNCs in agriculture? Who are the new investors and how do they differ from traditional TNCs? What are the pros and cons of developing country farmers being drawn into global agribusiness value chains?
• What can developing countries expect from the renewal of FDI in agriculture? Given the past record, will this time the impact of TNCs in agriculture be different?
• How does TNC participation in agricuture affect socially sensitive issues, including those related to food security and the food crisis; as well as the non-food uses of agricultural produce for biofuels?
• What policy challenges does TNC involvement in agriculture raise? How are they being addressed within the framework national economic strategies, with the aim of maximizing benefits and minimizing costs from TNC involvement?
• Are policy makers sufficiently prepared to meet the challenges? How can the international community support them?

According to WIR09, after decades of slow growth, TNCs´ interest and participation in agriculture - including FDI - is again on the rise. Despite this rise, in most countries today only a small share of FDI goes to agriculture. There are nevertheless some developing countries, including least developed countries (LDCs), where the share of agriculture in inward FDI is relatively important. Renewed interest of foreign investors in agricultural investment is significant enough to raise questions about whether FDI and other forms of TNC participation in agriculture can contribute to the development of this long neglected industry. WIR09 suggests an integrated policy approach that takes into account all concerns arising from TNC involvement.

Host countries need to consider when it is appropriate to draw TNCs into the development and management of infrastructure. They also need to find ways of ensuring that projects with TNC involvement lead to the expected development effects. This is a complex policy challenge.
As policy priorities and options vary between countries, so too does the optimal mix of public and private (including TNC) investment. Designing and implementing appropriate policies to harness the potential role of TNCs in infrastructure require adequate skills and capabilities. Governments need to prioritize among competing demands for different projects, establish clear and realistic objectives for the projects chosen, and integrate them into broader development strategies. This means that government agencies have to possess the necessary institutional capacity and skills to guide, negotiate, regulate and monitor the projects. This applies not only at the central level, but also in provincial and municipal governments.
While many developing countries seek foreign investment to develop their physical infrastructure, convincing foreign companies to invest has in many cases become even more challenging.

World Investment Report 2007 (WIR07) is the seventeenth in a series published by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). The Report analyses the latest trends in foreign direct investment (FDI) and puts a special focus in 2007 on the role of transnational corporations (TNCs) in the extraction of oil, gas, and metal minerals.

Higher prices for many minerals have led to renewed investor interest in the extractive industries. TNCs  ( including some of the world´s largest corporations) play a key role in the mining of metals and in the extraction of oil and gas. Privately owned TNCs dominate the harvesting of metal minerals, while State-owned companies from developing and transition economies are key players in oil and gas. Many such State-owned firms are emerging as TNCs in their own right.

Drawing on unique data, the Report examines TNC involvement in the extraction of mineral resources and maps the key countries and companies. It also discusses how the forces driving investment change as raw materials progress up the "value chain" to become finished products, and as different types of companies participate. In view of recent discussion of the so-called "resource curse," the Report explores how the participation of TNCs may help or hinder long-term, broad-based economic development in developing countries -- the best approach for reducing poverty and raising living standards. It considers how energy and mineral extraction can help governments achieve such aims.

RP2008/109 Valpy FitzGerald:
Political regime, private investment, and foreign direct investment in developing countries

This paper uses annual aggregate data for 36 low or middle income countries covering the period 1995-2001 to investigate the effect of FDI on private investment. It also explores if the relationship between FDI and private investment is influenced by the nature of the political regime, using four governance measures (voice and accountability, regulatory quality, political stability, and control of corruption) to distinguish between ‘market-friendly’ (high or good governance values) and ‘market-unfriendly’ (low governance) regimes. The results, which hold for all of the governance measures, show that private investment is more important than FDI in terms of the contribution to total investment, and that FDI inflows and private investment are higher in countries with good governance. Interestingly, the findings demonstrate that FDI tends to displace domestic private investment, and this ‘crowding out’ effect is greater in countries with good governance.

RP2006/35 Valpy FitzGerald:
International Risk Tolerance, Capital Market Failure and Capital Flows to Emerging Markets

The level, tenor and instability of capital flows from global financial markets towards developing countries are a major source of concern for macroeconomic managers, while their causes remain largely unexplained by economic theory. Country ‘fundamentals’ (such as economic growth, monetary stability and institutional capacity) as sources of default risk have been the main focus of economic research and policy prescriptions. However, recent empirical research on the determinants of capital flows and the roots of market failure indicate that much of the explanation lies in the nature of the home (that is, the developed country) demand for emerging market assets. In this paper, the microeconomic roots of home bias and demand instability are explained in terms of investor risk perception and credit rationing, exacerbated by traders’ behaviour. The consequences for host country macroeconomic balances and income distribution of varying investor risk tolerance are then demonstrated. Although the net impact also depends upon the host policy response, this transmission mechanism means that host ‘fundamentals’ are themselves strongly affected by capital flows and thus cannot be considered as to be independent of home asset demand. The paper concludes by examining the implications of these findings for the future of development economics in general and for policy response in particular.

RP2005/31 Henrik Hansen and John Rand:
On the Causal Links between FDI and Growth in Developing Countries

We analyse the Granger causal relationships between foreign direct investment (FDI) and GDP in a sample of 31 developing countries covering 31 years. Using estimators for heterogeneous panel data we find bi-directional causality between the FDI-to-GDP ratio and the level of GDP. FDI has a lasting impact on GDP, while GDP has no longrun impact on the FDI-to-GDP ratio. In that sense FDI causes growth. Furthermore, in a model for GDP and FDI as a fraction of gross capital formation (GCF) we also find long-run effects from FDI to GDP. This finding may be interpreted as evidence in favour of the hypotheses that FDI has an impact on GDP via knowledge transfers and adoption of new technology.

RP2005/26 Roghieh Gholami, Sang-Yong Tom Lee and Almas Heshmati:
The Causal Relationship between ICT and FDI

This paper investigates the simultaneous causal relationship between investments in information and communication technology (ICT) and flows of foreign direct investment (FDI), with reference to its implications on economic growth. For the empirical analysis we use data from 23 major countries with heterogeneous economic development for the period 1976–99. Our causality test results suggest that there is a causal relationship from ICT to FDI in developed countries, which means that a higher level of ICT investment leads to an increase inflow of FDI. ICT may contribute to economic growth indirectly by attracting more FDI. Contrarily, we could not find significant causality from ICT to FDI in developing countries. Instead, we have partial evidence of opposite causality relationship. The inflow of FDI causes further increases in ICT investment and production capacity.

RP2005/25 Abdur Chowdhury and George Mavrotas:
FDI and Growth: A Causal Relationship

The paper examines the causal relationship between FDI and economic growth by using an innovative econometric methodology to study the direction of causality between the two variables. We apply our methodology, based on the Toda-Yamamoto test for causality, to time-series data covering the period 1969-2000 for three developing countries, namely Chile, Malaysia and Thailand, all of them major recipients of FDI with a different history of macroeconomic episodes, policy regimes and growth patterns. Our empirical findings clearly suggest that it is GDP that causes FDI in the case of Chile and not vice versa, while for both Malaysia and Thailand, there is a strong evidence of a bi-directional causality between the two variables. The robustness of the above findings is confirmed by the use of a bootstrap test employed to test the validity of our results.

RP2005/24 Elizabeth Asiedu:
Foreign Direct Investment in Africa: The Role of Natural Resources, Market Size, Government Policy, Institutions and Political Instability

Data from several investor surveys suggest that macroeconomic instability, investment restrictions, corruption and political instability have a negative impact on foreign direct investment (FDI) to Africa. However, the relationship between FDI and these country characteristics has not been studied. This paper uses panel data for 22 countries over the period 1984-2000 to examine the impact of natural resources, market size, government policies, political instability and the quality of the host country’s institutions on FDI. It also analyses the importance of natural resources and market size vis-ŕ-vis government policy and the host country’s institutions in directing FDI flows. The main result is that natural resources and large markets promote FDI. However, lower inflation, good infrastructure, an educated population, openness to FDI, less corruption, political stability and a reliable legal system have a similar effect. A benchmark specification shows that a decline in the corruption from the level of Nigeria to that of South Africa has the same positive effect on FDI as increasing the share of fuels and minerals in total exports by about 35 per cent. These results suggest that countries that are small or lack natural resources can attract FDI by improving their institutions and policy environment.

RP2004/64 Yuqing Xing and Guanghua Wan:
Exchange Rates and Competition for FDI

This paper analyses the role of exchange rates in the competition for FDI. Based on the assumption that two countries compete for FDI from the same source country, the paper shows explicitly that the relative FDI of one country is determined by the relative real exchange rate between its currency and that of the source country. The theoretical result suggests that, if the currency of one FDI recipient country appreciates against the source country more than that of its rival, its FDI inflows will decrease while the competing country’s FDI will increase. Using data on Japan’s FDI in nine Asian manufacturing sectors from 1981 to 2002, the paper also examines the theoretical conclusion in the context of the competition between China and ASEAN-4 (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand). Empirical results show that the relative exchange rate is a statistically significant factor determining the relative inflows of Japanese FDI for manufacturing as a whole and for such sub-sectors as textiles, food, electronics, transportation equipment, and others. Exchange rate polices of the ASEAN-4 countries played a critical role in dynamically reshaping the geographic distribution of Japan’s FDI in Asia.

DP2003/75 Jonathan P. Thomas:
Bankruptcy Proceedings for Sovereign State Insolvency and their Effect on Capital Flows

The paper examines the main issues involved in translating domestic bankruptcy procedures to the sovereign context. It considers some of the principles by which domestic bankruptcy procedures operate, and the extent to which they apply to international lending. Two recent proposals are considered in more detail, that of Krueger (‘A New Approach to Sovereign Debt Restructuring’) and that of Pettifor (‘Resolving International Debt Crises – The Jubilee Framework for International Insolvency’). The paper also considers the question of the ex ante effects of a procedure which makes default less costly, and concludes that despite a negative impact on the ability to borrow, the overall welfare effect need not be negative.

DP2003/45 Tony Addison and Almas Heshmati:
The New Global Determinants of FDI Flows to Developing Countries: The Importance of ICT and Democratization

Foreign direct investment (FDI) has increased dramatically in recent years. However, the distribution of FDI is highly unequal and very poor countries face major difficulties in attracting foreign investors. This paper investigates the determinants of FDI inflows to developing countries, with a particular emphasis on the impact of the ‘third wave of democratization’ that started in the early 1980s and the spread of information and communication technology (ICT) that began in the late 1980s. These two global developments must now be taken into account in any explanation of what determines FDI flows. Using a large sample of countries, together with panel data techniques, the paper explores the determinants of FDI. The causal relationship between FDI, GDP growth, trade openness and ICT is investigated. The main findings are that democratization and ICT increase FDI inflows to developing countries. The paper concludes that more assistance should be given to poorer countries to help them to adopt ICT and to break out of their present ‘low ICT equilibrium’ trap.

DP2003/43 Matthew Odedokun:
The ‘Pull’ and ‘Push’ Factors in North-South Private Capital Flows: Conceptual Issues and Empirical Estimates

This paper is an attempt to rectify some of the problems that characterize most earlier studies that seek to explain private capital flows to developing countries or, at least, to examine the subject from a different and complementary perspective. To accomplish this, we propose a model framework that approaches the issue from the perspective of a capital-exporting developed country and which also takes cognizance of developments in other industrialized countries that could be competing with developing countries for private capital flows. The model is operationalized and estimated with annual panel data over 1970-2000 for 19 capital-exporting developed countries. Specifically, we estimate equations for total private flows, FDI, total portfolio capital flows (PCF) and various categories of PCF. We also test for the effects of a number of factors, each of which has its own ‘push’ and ‘pull’ components. The specific explanatory factors are the level of per capita income, interest rate, economic growth, the prevailing phase of economic cycle, the degree of openness of the economy in the balance-of-payment capital account, macroeconomic imbalances, and external debt burden. The empirical findings confirm the posited effects of the ‘push’ and/or ‘pull’ component of each of the above factors.

DP2003/30 Roghieh Gholami, Sang-Yong Tom Lee and Almas Heshmati:
The Causal Relationship between Information and Communication Technology and Foreign Direct Investment

This paper investigates the simultaneous causal relationship between investments in information and communication technology (ICT) and foreign direct investment (FDI), with reference to its implications on economic growth. For the empirical analysis we use data from 23 major countries with heterogeneous economics development for the period 1976–99. The results of unit roots and Johansen co-integration tests indicate variations in degrees of integration among the sample countries. Our causality test results suggest that there is a causal relationship from ICT to FDI interpreted as the higher level of ICT investment leads to increased inflow of FDI. ICT contributes to economic growth indirectly by attracting more foreign direct investment. In developed countries there already exist a build up ICT capacity which causes inflow of FDI, while in developing countries ICT capacity must be build up to attract FDI. The inflow of FDI causes further increases in ICT investment and capacity.

DP2003/02 Oluyele Akinkugbe:
Flow of Foreign Direct Investment to Hitherto Neglected Developing Countries

The last decade or so has witnessed rather dramatic increases in the flow of foreign direct investment (FDI) to the developing countries of the world. However, the balance of evidence seems to point in one direction, the inflow has been uneven. Middle-income developing countries have benefited from this upsurge at the expense of the lower-income countries. In an attempt to explore the two complimentary issues involved in FDI flows, we adopted the two-part econometric approach in which a Probit model was first estimated in order to examine the binary issue of whether or not to locate FDI in hitherto neglected developing countries. In the second step, a panel regression model was employed to examine the factors that may explain the volume of FDI to further allocate to existing FDI-receiving countries. Our findings reveal that a combination of high per capita income, outward-orientation to international trade, a high level of infrastructure development and a high rate of return on investment are the significant decision parameters in the two-part aggregate investors’ behaviour analyses.

DP2003/01 Matthew Odedokun:
A Holistic Perception of Foreign Financing of Developing Countries’ Private Sectors: Analysis and Description of Structure and Trends

The paper presents a comprehensive survey of the ‘shopping list’ of sources of external finance that are directly channelled to the business sector of developing countries. Generally, our analytical survey covers the 1970-2000 period, and includes the distribution of foreign resources classified according to the different income-based and geographical breakdown of developing countries. We examine aggregate net resource flows in the form of the saving-investment gap and current account surplus in the balance-of-payments of developed countries. Also examined is the institutionalized component of this aggregate, which encompasses both official and private flows. In addition, we discuss the different components of private flows, including unrequited private transfers (grants by NGOs and workers’ remittances) and commercial capital flows (private flows to multilateral institutions and bilateral private capital flows in the form of foreign direct investments and portfolio capital flows) to developing countries.