Is there anything special with Intra-Arab Foreign direct investment?

Khalid Sekkat

ULB Institutional Repository from ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles

Abstract: The determinants of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) inflows to Arab countries particularly vary depending on what the source country is, i.e. Arab or non-Arab countries. Estimation is conducted on a separate sample for source countries but with the same set of determinants. We found that intra-Arab FDI is much higher than what can be deduced from current empirical models. More strikingly, the determinants of Arab FDI inflows are influenced by the supplier. Human capital, quality of institutions, infrastructure and openness hardly affect intra-Arab inflows while they normally affect non-Arab inflows. Two possible explanations are proposed. One is that a large share of intra Arab FDI is provided by government or related entities which obey specific regional strategic considerations. The other is that cultural similarity allows Arab investors to use informal socio-cultural networks, and thus to be less sensitive to socalled FDI fundamental determinants than non-Arab investors. 2014-Center for Economic Integration, Sejong Institution, Sejong University, All Rights Reserved.

Keywords: Arab countries; Cultural similarity; FDI (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
Note: SCOPUS: ar.j
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published in: Journal of Economic Integration (2014) v.29 n° 1,p.139-164

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Journal Article: Is There Anything Special with Intra-Arab Foreign Direct Investment? (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ulb:ulbeco:2013/168682

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://hdl.handle.ne ... lb.ac.be:2013/168682

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ULB Institutional Repository from ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Benoit Pauwels ().