0000000000451372
AUTHOR
Jakob Schwab
Throwing the Spanner in the Works: The Mixed Blessing of FDI
FDI is generally attributed to have positive impact for developing countries. In contrast, this paper shows that foreign capital inflows may cause an economy to be stuck in a middle-income trap. Introducing a simple capital market imperfection into a standard neoclassical (open-economy) model of growth, I show that FDI crowds out domestic investment when countries are still growing. If profitable investments are pursued by foreign capital owners, this does reduce chances for domestic entrepreneurs that they would have otherwise been able to take, by means of economy-wide savings. The long term losses due to the crowding-out effect occur despite the short-term gains that sudden capital inflo…
Depression of the deprived or eroding enthusiasm of the elites: What has shifted the support for international trade?
Abstract We use the 2003 and 2013 waves of the International Survey Program (ISSP) in order to explore the change in people’s attitudes that may be behind the recent backlash against globalization. We show that the average support for international trade has decreased in many – albeit not all – countries, and we demonstrate that these changes are related to the depth and length of the global financial crisis of 2008/09 as well as the evolution of income inequality. Moreover, our results document a declining support of those individuals who are likely to benefit from international trade: the young, high-skilled and well-off. We show that this “eroding enthusiasm of the elites” is empirically…
Like it or not? How the economic and institutional environment shapes individual attitudes towards multinational enterprises
The integration of goods and factor markets has affected the lives of individuals all over the world. While some agents have reaped enormous benefits from this process, others have lost in terms of income and welfare. It is usually argued that individuals are aware of the distributional effects of globalization, and that this knowledge shapes their preferences over various policy issues such as protection, financial market regulation etc. In this chapter, we use a large surveybased data set to explore whether this conjecture is correct when it comes to individuals’ attitudes towards multinational enterprises (MNEs).