Browsing by Author "Asikainen, Tuomas"

Foreign direct investment (FDI) flows have increased tremendously in the past twenty years, and these investments have grown especially in developing economies. FDI has become an efficient mechanism to increase economic development in poor countries. This thesis opens up the decision-making process of developed countries related to FDI decisions. The main focus is to concentrate on FDI in developing countries, and how they try to find relevant policies in order to attract more FDI flows. Some relevant empirical findings between China and Sub-Saharan Africa are shown to support the benchmark model. The model does not go through every possible aspect of FDI but shows how different southern technology frontiers and risks in production might affect the final FDI flows in developing countries. The benchmark model is a North-South model where the North and South are the developed and developing country, respectively. The main feature of this model is that a northern firm might opt out of doing FDI, if the technology frontier in a southern industry is too low for a northern firm with a relatively high technology. This situation might cause a risk of FDI quality failure, where the production chain in the South fails to complete successfully. This kind of failure is possible, if the skills or knowledge of the southern workers is not high enough. The benchmark model is later extended with the innovative and imitative South in this thesis, and lastly technology-neutral risks are introduced and added to the benchmark model. The benchmark model shows that only firms with intermediate technology levels in the North move production to the South or become multinationals. Additionally, more multinational production increases the technology frontier in the South and eventually decreases the risk of FDI quality failure. This development leads to more FDI flows and widens the technology spectrum of the multinational firms. The aim of governments in developing countries is to increase their technology frontiers in different industries. This thesis goes through many important policy parameters which can improve the technology frontier in the South and eventually lead to more multinational production.