The Foreign Direct Investments: on the main drivers and the economic effects in the US

Abstract

During the last thirty years the globalization has transformed the World economy: firms now are able to implement almost infinite strategies to reach new customers in the entire globe. In order to implement this kind of strategies, businesses have also realized investments outside the national borders in which they were based: if they accomplish some criteria, these expenditures of money can be classified as Foreign Direct Investments, or FDIs. The object of this thesis is to study the phenomenon of FDI, and the structure of this work can be described as follows: In the first chapter the main concepts and theories behind Foreign Direct Investments will be exposed, together with the review of the existing literature regarding this phenomenon. The second chapter will concentrate on the discovery and the explanation of the main drivers that influence decisions of a company to invest in a country rather than in another one. The third part of this paper is dedicated to the investigation of the consequences of Foreign Direct Investments, together with other economic measures, on the economic growth of the United States of America, selected as sample country. A multivariate linear regression model will be used in order to accomplish this result. Finally, in the conclusive part of this work the key concepts of each chapter will be summarised, together with the main results and the further developments of the concepts involved in this thesis.