FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENT IN THE EUROZONE COUNTRIES: STOCHASTICITY OF THE FINANCIAL INFLUENCE FACTORS

Globalization and liberalization processes observed in the capital market draw special attention to the international flows of investment resources. The study of the foreign investors' interests and areas of their implementation in the Eurozone countries becomes particularly topical considering the fact that each of these countries has its own significant features in the structural framework of the economy as well as in the incentive policy formation. To prove the hypothesis of the stochastic nature specific to the influence of financial factors on the FDI attraction, a grouping of the Eurozone countries took place based on their attractiveness to foreign investors retrospectively and in 2018. For this purpose, the study relied on the cluster analysis tools, namely the Ward and Euclidean distance methods, which allowed defining four clusters of the Eurozone countries: the Netherlands represents the first cluster as a country that remains attractive to foreign investors and has a high FDI flow to GDP; the second one includes Ireland and Luxembourg (these countries were attractive to non-resident investors, but they have been showing outflows of foreign investment recently); the third cluster comprises Austria, the Slovak Republic, Portugal, Spain, Belgium, and Estonia (with a moderate FDI accumulation in the economy and a relatively stable FDI flow); Finland, Germany, France, Slovenia, Greece, and Italy refer to the fourth one as countries that are least sensitive to foreign investment and do not focus their policies on its aggressive attraction. Kendall tau rank correlation coefficients and Spearman correlation coefficients have served as a tool for determining the relationship between the foreign direct investment flow and macro(the inflation, government debt rates, long-term interest rates referred to government bonds, the current account balance level in GDP and the corporate tax rates) and micro-level (the profitability of financial and non-financial corporations and the level of their debt as a risk factor) factors by country groups. Their analysis revealed that it is inexpedient to unify the investment policy of financial incentives for different countries because they have a differentiated structural framework of the economy; their investors are interested in different aspects of decision-making and place different expectations on the macroeconomic policies of host countries. The above refutes certain well-established theoretical views on the determined relationship between the investment activity and the financial factors influencing it.