Foreign direct investment, economic performance and trade liberalisation

Abstract

In a number of influential papers published by V. N. Balasubramanyam and collaborators during the decade of the 1990s, compelling arguments and supporting evidence was presented to indicate that export-promoting trade and investment strategies attract more and more productive inflows of foreign capital than do import-substituting strategies. This paper revisits these hypotheses in the context of more recent cross-section data and reports evidence to suggest that the earlier findings are robust. © 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.