Foreign Direct Investmant Productive Capacity And Exchange Rate Regimes

This paper investigates the factors determining the impact of exchange rate regimes on the behavior of domestic investment and foreign direct investment (FDI). Producers may diversify internationally in order to increase the flexibility of production. We characterize the possible equilibria in a macro model that allows for the presence of a short-run Phillips curve. It is shown that a fixed exchange rate regime is more conducive to FDI relative to a flexible exchange rate, and this conclusion applies for both real and nominal shocks. If the dominant shocks are nominal (real) we will observe a negative (a positive) correlation between exchange rate volatility and the level of investment.

We test the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on economic growth in a cross-country regression framework, utilizing data on FDI flows from industrial countries to 69 developing countries over the last two decades. Our results suggest that FDI is an important vehicle for the transfer of technology, contributing relatively more to growth than domestic investment. However, the higher productivity of FDI holds only when the host country has a minimum threshold stock of human capital. In addition, FDI has the effect of increasing total investment in the economy more than one for one, which suggests the predominance of complementarity effects with domestic firms.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the implications of foreign direct investment and endogenous capacity choice on the welfare ranking of exchange rate regimes, and to analyze the linkages between volatility of shocks, the volume of trade and investment. We construct an intertemporal version of a monopolistic competitive framework, where producers may diversify internationally by foreign direct investment. Volatility is shown to induce both higher international trade in goods, as well as higher foreign direct investment, with the possibility of increasing the productive capacity in diversified industries. We apply the above framework to the welfare ranking of exchange rate regimes in the presence of nominal contracts. We show that the volatility of employment in the presence of real shocks is lower under a floating exchange rate regime, but that a by-product of the relative stability of employment is a lower expected GNP in a flexible exchange rate regime. Nominal shocks in a floating exchange rate regime are shown to generate international diversification, which leads to a higher capital cost of diversified industries. This effect implies a lower number of? independent producers and of varieties offered, ultimately leading to a lower expected utility of consumption. We show that attempts to reduce foreign direct investment by capital controls will tend to reduce welfare, without affecting our results regarding the ranking of exchange rate regimes. These observations lead us to conclude that volatility effects reduce the relative attractiveness of floating exchange rates. This conclusion applies to both real and nominal shocks.

This paper analyzes the impact of capital inflows and exchange rate flexibility on the real exchange rate in developing countries based on panel cointegration techniques. The results show that public and private flows are associated with a real exchange rate appreciation. Among private flows, portfolio investment has the highest appreciation effect-almost seven times that of foreign direct investment or bank loans-and private transfers have the lowest effect. Using a de facto measure of exchange rate flexibility, we find that a more flexible exchange rate helps to dampen appreciation of the real exchange rate stemming from capital inflows.