FDI and the Process of European Integration A Brief Overview

The object of this short paper is to focus on one of the many aspects of FDI - the one related to the location of industrial activity with respect to the process of European economic integration - with the aim of reviewing the most recent theoretical contributions to this topic, and to evaluate the robustness of the main empirical results. The overall evidence suggests that a precise assessment of the effects of the process of European integration on FDI and MNEs activity is far from being available. Much work has to be done especially on the data side in order to obtain a precise diagnosis of the European “new” industrial geography following integration.