The trend of foreign direct investment movement: Did unintended nation brand of legal-families play an instrumental role?

Abstract

Combining the suggestion from Fan (2006) that a nation can have a brand image without deliberating efforts of nation branding and the work from Klerman et al. (2011) on Colonial History and effects on legal systems, we view that legal-systems could be an unintended nation brand that could instrumentally affect foreign direct investment (FDI) activities. We classify 193 countries according to their Colonial History or no-Colonial History into 5 legal-families. Applying Generalised Methods of Moments (GMM) on a set of panel data, our empirical evidence shows that legal-families play an instrumental role in explaining FDI activities. The paper opens up a new ground of research on ‘unintended’ nation brand of which the nation branding literature largely focus on designed-nation-brand, and on FDI area in which we introduce a new determinant in addition to the traditional determinants that have been reported in the FDI literature.