Agglomeration and Determinants of Foreign Direct Investment in Transition Economies

The objective of this paper is to investigate the determinants of foreign direct investment inflows in the transition economies between 1990 and 1998. The paper brings two innovations. One is the attention to the effect of agglomeration, an issue that has been highlighted recently in the works of Economic Geography. The second innovation is that we look at all transition countries instead of focusing on, for instance, EU candidates. We find that the main determinants of FDI in transition are agglomeration, the quality of the bureaucracy and the quality of infrastructure. We also find an important difference between CEE and CIS countries. The agglomeration effect is greater for CIS countries than in non-CIS countries. For non-CIS countries, education, infrastructure, and quality of bureaucracy are the main attractors. For CIS countries, availability of cheap labor and sufficient infrastructure, and abundance of natural resources are the main factors influencing FDI flows. Also, the further away from Germany, the more FDI CIS countries receive