Foreign Direct Investment, Export and Economic Growth: Empirical Evidence from New EU Countries

Whether foreign direct investment (FDI) is beneficial to host country growth or not is a question debated since a long time. This paper provides a survey of the literature on FDI, export and growth, and empirically investigates the causal relationship between economic growth, export and FDI for the ten transition European countries (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovak Republic and Slovenia). The ARDL bounds testing approach is used to investigate the existance of long-run relationship between FDI, export and economic growth for these countries. After detection of cointegratin relationship, the error-correction based Granger causality test is employed to examine the both long-run and short-run causality issues between the variables by using quarterly data from 1994 to 2008. These causality results reveal that there is causal relationship between FDI, export and economic growth in four out of ten countries considered.