Depending on one's point of view, multinational enterprises are either the heroes or the villains of the globalized economy. Governments compete fiercely for foreign direct investment by such companies, but complain when firms go global and move their activities elsewhere. Multinationals are...

During the recent period, many countries compete with each other to attract foreign investment. When MNCs invest in a host country, it is assumed that a part of their technology spills to the host country firms. But empirical studies on spillover effects of FDI have failed to find robust...

We examine the empirical impact of FDI and neighbourhood spillover on regional income convergence via technology diffusion in the Pacific Basin. The capacity of parametric estimation to trace the evolution of economies is found wanting as it conceals this evolution by averaging across economies.

Foreign investment has proven essential for economic growth and the present paper connects it explicitly to the capital stock in the neoclassical growth model. The assumption in the literature of perfect foreign investment implies no distinction between domestic and foreign capital. In the...

Many of the new member states as well as candidate and accession countries of the EU are confident that membership will result in substantially increased inward foreign direct investment (FDI) in manufacturing. This paper discusses the policy issues and challenges that cohesion and accession...

This Selected Issues paper and Statistical Appendix provides an estimate of the long-term path of Romania’s real exchange rate. The paper describes the recent history of the real exchange rate and its main determinants. A model is developed of a time-varying long-term exchange rate path,...

This Selected Issues paper on the United States examines the effect of the structure of the mortgage market on real housing activity and housing prices. The market-based financial structure has reduced the volatility of mortgage lending. Changes in the structure of the mortgage market have...

Fixed exchange rate regimes have come into disrepute, as their defense has become all but impossible. Yet, while a determined attack on a currency cannot be prevented or, ultimately, withstood, policies can reduce the vulnerability of a country to such attacks. The paper develops an analytical...

We use data on the sources of debt finance of U.S. majority-owned foreign affiliates in 53 countries over the period 1983 to 2001 to examine the role of financial market development, and exposure to host country-specific risk on the financing choices of these affiliates. We find that total...

We estimate international technology spillovers to U.S. manufacturing firms via imports and foreign direct investment (FDI) between 1987 and 1996. In contrast to earlier work, our results suggest that FDI leads to substantial productivity gains for domestic firms. The size of FDI spillovers is...