An effective commercial arbitration regime matters for foreign investors. It gives parties the autonomy to create a dispute resolution system tailored to increasingly complex disputes. Foreign investors view arbitration as a way to mitigate risks by providing legal certainty on enforcement...

The ease of converting and transferring currency is a crucial consideration for firms investing in a foreign economy. The Converting and Transferring Currency data and indicators measure foreign exchange restrictions most relevant for foreign direct investment across economies to identify common...

This paper considers institutional and structural factors associated with investment activity in a panel of up to 129 developed and developing countries. It introduces these factors to a standard neoclassical investment function for open economies, and find that financial development and...

Using newly collected survey data on direct supplier-multinational linkages in Chile, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Mozambique, Swaziland, and Vietnam, this paper first evaluates whether foreign investors differ from domestic producers in terms of their potential to generate positive spillovers for...

A large literature has argued that different types of capital flows have different consequences for macroeconomic stability. By distinguishing between foreign direct investment and portfolio and other investments, this paper studies the effects of the composition of capital inflows on output...

Private Chinese outbound investment, not as well-known as government-led investment, offers special opportunities and challenges for Africa today. The significance of Chinese private-sector investment is already visible in the burgeoning manufacturing sector in some parts of Africa, and the...

Foreign investors are increasingly important participants in the local currency sovereign bond markets of developing countries. This note provides context on the overall growth of local currency sovereign debt markets in emerging markets and the growth of foreign investor participation in these...

Using a cross-section of more than 25,000 domestic manufacturing firms in 78 low and middle-income countries from the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys, this paper assesses how mediating factors influence intra-industry productivity spillovers to domestic firms from foreign direct investment. It...

This paper uses a large cross-country dataset to empirically examine factors associated with sovereign defaults on external private creditors and expropriation of foreign direct investments in developing countries since the 1970s. In the long run, sovereign defaults and expropriations are likely...