Foreign Direct Investment versus Portfolio Investment : A Global Games Approach

We present a model of investment under uncertainty about fundamentals, using a global games approach. Goldstein & Razin (2003) show that there is an information based trade-off between foreign direct investment (FDI) and portfolio investment (PI) which rationalizes some well known stylised facts in the literature - the relative volatility and reversibility of foreign direct investment versus portfolio investment. We extend their result and show that uncertainty about fundamentals does not imply a multiplicity of investment outcomes even when there is an information-based trade-off between direct investments and portfolio investments. In our paper, uncertainty about fundamentals actually helps narrow down the set of possible equilibria. Hence we find that the equilibrium outcome does not exhibit co-ordination failure.