FDI, domestic investment and 2008 financial crisis: Evidence from emerging nations

Abstract

This research extends Dunning’s investment development path theory to assess the long-run relationship among foreign direct investment (FDI) inflow, outflow and domestic investment (DI) for 32 emerging market economies (EMEs) based on 17 years data from 1996 to 2012. Breitung Panel unit root test has been used to identify the presence of unit root in the panel data. Since the FDI flows and domestic investments were found to be non-stationary at they were first differenced for converting to stationary variables. Based on Pedroni’s panel cointegration test a long-run relationship among DI, FDI inflow, and FDI outflow was observed indicating that the variables were integrated of order one. Further panel VECM was carried out to assess the causality and it was observed that a joint long-run causality was present both from FDI inflow and outflow towards DI. This essentially indicates that the FDI flows to EMEs will augment domestic capital formation. Therefore policy makers from the EMEs instead of focusing on standalone increase in FDI inflow should focus on both FDI inflow and outflow. However, in the short-run, DI was caused only by FDI inflow, and FDI outflow did not have any causal impact on DI. Further applying fully modified OLS (FMOLS) and dynamic OLS (DOLS) it was observed that FDI inflow and FDI outflow have crowding-in effects on DI. Hence, it can be concluded that for EMEs FDI outflow is also equally important in addition to FDI inflow to augment DI. The impact of 2008 crisis was also examined in the light of FDI outflows and inflows from EMEs. Results based on FMOLS and DOLS indicate that 2008 crisis negatively affected the FDI inflow but the effect on outflows was not statistically significant. These results advocate for a protection mechanism from the financial crises for the EMEs as the FDI inflow declined during the period. Further incentivizing the domestic firms investing abroad for technologies and synergies as FDI outflow also enhances growth.