An empirical criticism of the "FDI development" convention

Pro-Foreign Domestic Investment (FDI) policies have become a pillar of the development convention. While the literature has provided numerous studies on the effects of FDI on growth and investment in host country, very little is known about how domestic investment itself affects FDI inflows. The paper is an attempt to fill this gap. Evidences from a large cross-country sample (68 countries), over a long period (1984-2004), show that lagged domestic investment has a strong influence on FDI inflows in the host economy, implying that domestic investment is a strong catalyst for FDI in developing countries and that multinational companies do follow economic development.