Foreign direct investment and trade: a causality analysis

We analyse in this paper the relationship between outward FDI and exports, with Spanish quarterly data for the period 1977-1992. The empirical methodology makes use of Granger-causality tests in a cointegration framework, where the order of lags for each variable has been selected by means of Hsiao’s sequential approach. The tests have been performed both in a bivariate and multivariate setting, in the latter case including as additional variables a proxy for world income and the relative price of exports. Since cointegration between outward FDI and exports was found, error-correction mechanisms under three alternative specifications were included, which allowed us to discriminate between short- and long-run Granger-causality. Our results point to the existence of long-run Granger-causality from outward FDI to exports, according to a complementary relationship, for the Spanish case during the period of analysis