Foreign Direct Investment impact on economic growth: a GVAR analysis of international linkages

Abstract

This thesis investigates the role of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) as a contributing factor to economic and technological progress in a set of target countries. The research is conducted via the Global Vector Autoregressive (GVAR) model, developed by Pesaran et.al (2004), to investigate the most relevant implications of an introduced shock in bilateral outward FDI flows from the United States. A sample of defined “host countries” is selected among the primary recipients of direct investments from the U.S. during the period 2000Q1-2019Q4; attention is posed to the inclusion of both developed and developing nations for the selection of a heterogeneous sample.

The Introduction is dedicated to a theoretical approach to economic growth, together with the intuitions to be tested on the chosen indicators. GVAR models are then discussed in Chapter 1, followed by a review of the dataset in Chapter 2; the last two Chapters are thus focused on model specification and analysis of the results via Generalised Impulse Response Functions (GIRF).