The Impact of the Investment Environment on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in the European Transition Economies

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to investigate the impact of the investment environment on FDI in transition economies in Europe, through the usage of dynamic panel methodology, due to the persistence of the endogeneity issues. Further, three main factors have been determined affecting the FDI in 15 developing countries through the time span 2009–2016 as Control of Corruption, Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism and Distance to frontier score (Doing Business) having positive and significant effect on attracting FDI in these transition countries. Also as pull factors are used GDP per capita, profit tax rate showing positive and significant effect on FDI flows, while unemployment rate was positive but does not have a significant role in the attraction of FDI flows in European transition countries. In addition, to our best knowledge this paper is among the first that attempts to investigate this relationship in this set of countries by employing the dynamic panel methodology using differenced GMM model as well as employing Distance to frontier score (Doing Business) as one of investment environment factors that impact FDI flows for this set of 15 countries. Furthermore, such findings will contribute to the existing literature by using these instruments to measure their impact on FDI attractiveness on European transition economies.