Foreign direct investment, economic growth and the moderation role of host country’s financial market

Abstract

foreign investments have always been welcome and policy makers always do their best in order to attract more and more capital into their area; But a question which gave rise to a series of studies is that is FDI always beneficial for the recipient and does it under all circumstances help the growth in the host economy? In order to answer this question, we first examined whether or not FDI, by itself, has any significant impact on growth and the results proved that FDI affects growth positively in our full sample. We then show that FDI's effect on growth is different in developed and non-developed countries. A surprising finding in our study is that in developed countries foreign flows of investment do not affect economic growth where this effect in non-developed countries is relatively high and significant. Three different stock market indicators (market capitalization, value traded and turnover ratio) are then introduced and it is tested whether the differences in FDI's impact in developed and non-developed countries is due to their stock-market-related financial absorptive capacities. Our key contribution in this paper, along with our other novel findings, is that we introduce cut-off levels for these three indicators which successfully split our sample into one sub-sample in which FDI strongly affects growth and one in which FDI's effect on growth diminishes.