This paper offers an introduction to the special issue on FDI and multinational corporations. It summarizes the contents of the five papers included, and relates them to the recent litera-ture on the subject.

This paper explores the economic relationship between foreign direct investment to developing countries and the export prices of the latter, measured by terms of trade. It is first shown that economic theory suggests such a relationship for various reasons but is inconclusive about the direction...

This paper first shows that important economic arguments in favor of the Prebisch-Singer hypothesis of falling terms of trade of developing countries have implicitly relied on the role of multinational corporations and foreign direct investment. As of yet, the relationship between the latter and...

This paper documents that cross-border investment income flows are important for explaining current account balances in major economies. Those investment incomes reflect returns on cross-border asset holdings and on balance often reach magnitudes around 5% of major economies' gross domestic...

Increased capital flows in the form of foreign direct investment (FDI) and the growing relevance of multinational corporations are two characteristics of the most recent wave of globalization. This volume extensively discusses how these phenomena are interrelated, what determines FDI flows and...