Throwing the Spanner in the Works: The Mixed Blessing of FDI

FDI is generally attributed to have positive impact for developing countries. In contrast, this paper shows that foreign capital inflows may cause an economy to be stuck in a middle-income trap. Introducing a simple capital market imperfection into a standard neoclassical (open-economy) model of growth, I show that FDI crowds out domestic investment when countries are still growing. If profitable investments are pursued by foreign capital owners, this does reduce chances for domestic entrepreneurs that they would have otherwise been able to take, by means of economy-wide savings. The long term losses due to the crowding-out effect occur despite the short-term gains that sudden capital inflows entail, as in static models. At the same time, savings that are not invested leave the country in turn, generating reverse capital flows.