International investment agreements and foreign direct investment: A survey

Abstract

This paper reviews the relationship between international investment agreements (IIAs) and foreign direct investment (FDI). It is organised in two parts. The first part explores the generic structure of IIAs and highlights the components that are particularly relevant to FDI. It then gives an overview of the specific content of investment treaties using a representative treaty sample over the period 1980–2020. The second part is devoted to surveying theoretical and empirical work on the impact of IIAs on FDI, while highlighting issues with the measurement of FDI, missing FDI data and effect identification due to endogeneity problems. A key difference from earlier surveys is that this article differentiates between IIAs depending on their content and takes this differentiation into account in the measurement of IIAs and their effects on FDI.