Impact of FDI on Private Investment in the Asian and African Developing Countries: A Panel-Data Approach

The paper aims to investigate the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on private investment with a sample having 49 developing countries in Asia (17 countries) and Africa (32 countries) during the period of 1990-2017. Unlike previous studies, we split the data into three groups for further analysis, including the Asian, African and the full-panel samples. The results confirm a crowding-in effect which shows that foreign direct investment promotes private investment on all three research samples. Besides, the lagged private investment has a positive and significant effect on itself in the next period which reflects the inertia in the trend of private investment in recipient countries. In the full-panel sample, there are some macro factors such as GDP per capita, trade openness, and electricity that also have a positive and statistically significant impact on private investment. Besides, when more deeply estimate with smaller samples, we find that trade openness and labour force have a positive and significant in Africa, on the other hand, not in Asia. However, the domestic credit variable has a negative and significant effect on private investment only in Asian developing countries. Furthermore, there is only a positive and significant impact of the electricity variable on private investment in Asia.