The Paradigm of the Investment Development Path: The Applicability for The European Union Members For 1990-2014 Period

This article describes how foreign direct investments (FDI) is one of the most important forces that influences the global economy. Along the last two and a half decades, the motivations and the field of interest of multinational enterprises (MNEs) mutated to new forms under the influence of globalization and the international financial crisis. Those two events had a dramatic impact on the evolution of inward and outward flow of FDI. The main scope of this article is to analyze the advance of the EU28 member states through the stages of the Investment Development Path (IDP) in the period from 1990 to 2014 and to explore the viability of the original model in nowadays global economy realities. The results show that FDI is useful to gauge the economics of lesser developed countries.