Foreign Direct Investment and Economic Growth

Foreign Direct Investment and Economic Growth Abstract This dissertation consists of three empirical research papers on FDI inflow and economic growth and the role the host country natural resources abundance and institutional quality play in altering the FDI-growth relationship. The first paper (chapter 2) investigates the FDI-growth relationship and the impact of the host country's natural resource abundance on the FDI-growth relationship. The paper uses a dataset of 117 countries over the period 1991-2016 and use system GMM estimation method and found a positive and significant impact of FDI inflows on the economic growth of the host country. However, FDI-induced growth was found to be more pronounced in the low-and middle-income countries compared to high-income countries. Further, FDI-induced economic growth is slowed down by the increase in the size of the natural resource sector both in the low-and middle-income as well as high- income countries. The direct negative impact of natural resources on growth was found to be stronger in the low-and middle-income countries compared to the high-income countries. Building on the results of the first paper (chapter 3), the second paper estimated a fixed effect threshold for the level of natural resources and found that FDI inflow has a stronger positive impact..