Foreign Direct Investment and growth in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe

This paper examines the role of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in promoting growth in 25 Central, Eastern and Southern European countries (CESE) using a dynamic panel approach that includes lags of involved variables to mitigate the problem of serial correlation. It adopts also a 'general-to-specific' approach to deal with the problem of the omitted variable and uses different estimation methods to control for heterogeneity. The main finding is that FDI has a positive and significant impact on economic growth coupled with an open economic environment.