The Global Race Foreing Direct Investment

Foreign direct investment (FDI) has become the prime engine to foster growth and to facilitate the restructuring and internationalization of formerly sheltered areas during the 1980s. This book deals with future prospects for FDI and provides answers to some critical questions at the beginning of the 1990s: Will the unprecedented high rate of growth of FDI in the 1980s continue for the rest of the twentieth century and beyond? If so, which will be the major recipient countries, source countries and sectors involved in these transactions? The general approach of each chapter is to review the factors that prompted the expansion of FDI during the 1980s. Their value as driving forces in the future is then assessed together with some new factors. The book contains nine chapters. The first four deal with general issues such as: Will the restrictions on capital flows be reimposed? What are the prospects for the world economy? Which ingredients will shape the global competition for investment? What are the likely patterns of FDI to emerge in the next decade? The remaining five chapters are devoted to special issues such as: How will increased instability in the financial system influence trade and FDI? What role in future FDI will merger and acquisition (M&A) activities play? What influence will the emerging market economies have on the global distribution of FDI? Will the Japanese continue to be the major foreign direct investors in the future? Will FDI from small and medium-sized firms gain momentum as they become more exposed to international competition and as their customers get increasingly involved in FDI?

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) studies have evolved as one of the mainstreams in business strategy. This book presents a comprehensive perspective on the motivations behind the studies, the effects of FDI, and how it can be utilized and extended to other areas of studies. Written with a global perspective, this book not only touches upon business strategies but also covers government policies toward promoting and attracting FDI for industrial and economic development. The author, with his vast experience in consulting and research projects for multinational companies, international organizations and governments, examines real world business practices of Eastern firms and how they relate to their Western counterparts, thus making this book a valuable and practical reference not only for students, but for practitioners, too.

In a stylized model of multinational firms choosing host locations for their global value chains, host-country governments choose the strength of collective-bargaining rights that allow their workers to receive a share of the resulting quasi-rents. Each government must trade off the direct benefit of stronger bargaining rights against both the effect of chasing multinationals away to rival countries and general-equilibrium effects of discouraging investment in the industry altogether. We find that an increase in globalization in the sense of lower transaction costs has no effect on equilibrium workers' rights, but adding more countries to the global trading system tends, in the limit, to weaken them. Thus, as a matter of theory, the effect of globalization on labor rights is ambiguous. Empirically, we find little evidence that globalization drives movements in labor rights in either direction.

Countries create different type of incentives for foreign firms, such as; direct incentives/subsidies, tax relief, soft loans and preferred handling. This volume aims to analyze the impact of European Union on inward foreign direct investment in Europe and to discuss what type of effects are being created by this race for FDI.

This book looks at the evidence and assesses the impact of competition among governments to attract FDI. It finds little evidence directly to support fears of a "global race to the bottom" in labour and environmental standards.

The rise of new economic powers in Asia and Latin America has changed the size and the direction of cross-border investment flows. Emerging economies like China, Brazil and India have become major destinations of foreign direct investment within the past decade, and they are also taking on the role of investor themselves. The unprecedented shifts in global investment flows have revived the debate over the effects of foreign investment on growth, employment and income distribution. In this book, leading experts analyse the most important trends, from the increasingly active role emerging economies play as investors in Africa to the rising suspicion in the U.S. and Europe of Chinese takeovers. Global challenges like climate change and the ageing of societies will act as new drivers of foreign investment, reshaping the patterns of globalization once again.

Pinto develops a partisan theory of foreign direct investment (FDI) arguing that left-wing governments choose policies that allow easier entry by foreign investors more than right-wing governments, and that foreign investors prefer to invest in countries governed by the left. To reach this determination, the book derives the conditions under which investment flows should be expected to affect the relative demand for the services supplied by economic actors in host countries. Based on these expected distributive consequences, a political economy model of the regulation of FDI and changes in investment performance within countries and over time is developed. The theory is tested using both cross-national statistical analysis and two case studies exploring the development of the foreign investment regimes and their performance over the past century in Argentina and South Korea.

In the age of globalization and increasing "internationalization," Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) have received considerable attention in the policy analysis circles. Developing countries attempt to seek more FDI inflows to fill up the resource gap that constrain their development. All too often, governments overlook technology, market access, and other externalities of inflows.LThis book is one of the first to bring the quality of dimension of inflows into the analysis of FDI. It also goes on to develop analytical models covering structural, geopolitical, and policy implications for international intervention.