Measuring Foreign Direct Investments’ Impact on Triple-bottom line Sustainability

Abstract

The development of international commercial relations and of internationalization strategies as Foreign Direct Investments has been recently disrupted by social and political events as the pandemic and the Russian conflict with Ukraine. These recent phenomena have exacerbated the need to face critical aspects shared by contemporary societies globally, among which, sustainability. FDI have been studied for their possible impacts on economic growth but there is still little research linking FDI and sustainability that measures FDI impact on triple-bottom line sustainability indexes. Therefore, this dissertation tries to combine two different streams of literature concerning FDI and sustainability. On the one hand, being FDI a globally widespread phenomenon, the literature review will focus on the international debate developed so far. On the other hand, countries as China have had a leading role in setting FDI trends. Furthermore, China has long been at the center of debate about sustainability for its massive economic growth strategies, which have prioritized GDP growth over sustainability. Because of the Chinese peculiar position towards FDI strategies and sustainability issues, the Chinese discussion about measuring impacts of FDI on sustainability will be deepened. Countries as Italy have recently become leading European players for developing FDI strategies that aim at exiting the crisis following the pandemics; moreover, Italy is still one of the most important commercial partners of China; this collaborative attitude can be observed from the trends of FDI that have been occurring between the two countries since the Chinese opening up. For these reasons, the Sino Italian FDI context will be discussed as well.