FDI into emerging markets: Do institutions really matter?

This empirical paper examines how institutional strengths or weaknesses of emerging markets might affect investment inflows into these countries. The study includes data of 13 emerging economies from different regions. The countries included are Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, Indonesia, India, South Korea, Mexico, Malaysia, Nigeria, Poland, Russia, and Turkey for the time period 2000-2018. The institutional variables; property rights, good governance, corruption, rule of law, and civil liberties are examined to understand if there is a deviation from the existing literature for the emerging countries. Secondly, we also investigated differences among the emerging countries and asked if non-BRIC countries are different in results. A panel data model has been performed for the analysis. Our findings prove that some institutions such as corruption, civil liberties, property rights, and good governance are significantly important to attract FDI into the emerging markets, as indicated in the literature for the developed countries, but not as strong as assumed. Secondly, other institutional constructs such as rule of law and political stability found to be insignificant in emerging markets. Finally, we found a similar result even when we analyzed emerging markets without BRIC countries