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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the factors of technology diffusion in Saudi Arabia. It is a relevant study for Saudi Arabia, which has embarked on high gears of economic modernization that is supposed to be driven by technology and knowledge. Thus, an up-to-date research on the factors of technology diffusion in the country is expected to be of high-valued contribution.

It employs co-integration method to analyse the long run relations between the technology diffusion and its determinants.

The study finds that the international trade, particularly the oil sector trade, of the Saudi Arabia appears to play no relevant role in the international technology transfer for Saudi Arabia. The study confirms that technology is an endogenous variable in the presence of human capital; and that the higher levels of educational attainments are found to significantly improve factor productivity. The foreign direct investment (FDI) stock is confirmed to be a consistent and important factor in the process of technology diffusion. The capital goods imports and the domestic R&D expenditure are found to be negatively associated with the technology diffusion.

The machine and transport equipment imports are used by the study as a measure of capital goods imports, and thus a better measure is needed in a further research. Similarly, the limited data on the domestic R&D expenditure has forced the author to rely on estimates and own calculations. Thus, these data limitations could not allow us to have better understanding of the impacts of capital goods imports and domestic R&D on the technology diffusion.

Human capital and FDIs are the key drivers the Saudi authorities should consider for transferring and diffusing technology in the country and expanding non-oil sources of economic growth.

This paper is a first of its kind for the case of Saudi Arabia to analyze the determinants of technology diffusion and investigate the role of the its oil sector trade in the technology diffusion. The oil sector trade is found insignificant in the international technology diffusion process; thus the authorities should refocus the oil sector trade towards technology localization and adoption to increase integrative by-product industries in the country.

The purpose of the paper is to question the false dilemma of bread (the social and economic rights) or freedom (the civil and political rights), which amounts to a simplified ambivalent vision either for or against “China in Africa”, in the debate over African workers’ rights in Chinese enterprises. The paper, first underscores the importance of the constraining and enabling institutional conditions by deconstructing this normative approach, and then proposes an alternative institutional approach to address issues pertaining to employment relations.

In the tradition of deconstructive techniques, the paper draws three lines of institutional resistance to move the “China in Africa” controversy in employment relations beyond its normative approach. These lines of demarcation are an African ethnology as opposed to a Western modernist reference, a postcolonial analysis of power in lieu of liberal hegemony and informality as a legitimate source of legality.

The paper suggests the Chinese corporate strategy as implemented by managers notably through human resource management practices, the African institutional contexts where the protagonists’ power resources are deployed and the paramount importance of informality in discussing the impacts of Chinese investments on workers’ rights in sub-Saharan Africa.

The paper shows that the disconnect between “good investment” that should improve social and economic rights and “bad employment” that downplays civil and political rights is not a “foreign” (Western or Chinese) issue per se, but a challenge for innovative employment relations that support investment and mind the workplace institutional context.

This study aims to explain the role of globalisation on the regional income growth disparities in the states of India and provinces in the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

The authors use two approaches to analyse regional growth disparities: growth accounting and the panel spatial Durbin model.

The growth accounting shows that contributions of growth of capital intensity (GKI) and total factor productivity growth (TFPG) distinguish the high-income (HI) regions from medium-income (MI) and lower-income (LI) regions in India. In the PRC, the contributions of GKI and TFPG in MI regions are slightly higher than HI regions, but significantly higher than the LI regions. The empirical results find that foreign direct investment (FDI), domestic investment, human capital, and interaction of FDI and human capital explain income growth states/provinces in India and the PRC. A region’s income growth and FDI inflows spread the benefit to neighbourhoods in both countries.

The paper contributes by performing a comparative analysis of Indian states and the PRC’s provinces by capturing the neighbourhood effects of economic growth, FDI, investment and human capital and also the interaction effects of FDI with human capital and domestic investment. A comparison of the decomposition of income growth to the growth of factor inputs and efficiency in Indian states and the PRC’s provinces also adds to the existing literature.

Given the inconclusive evidence in the literature on the impact of Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) flows, as well as dearth of literature on this subject matter as regards West Africa and the European Union (EU), the purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which BITs and preferential trade and investment agreements (PTIAs) triggered foreign investment flows particularly between the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) countries and the EU.

Trend analysis was used to trace the link between FDI and BITs, while panel regression models were used to investigate the impact of BITs on FDI during 1980‐2010.

Econometric results indicate that, as in most previous studies, BITs have strong positive impact on FDI in West Africa, with this impact significant at a higher level (1 per cent) for FDI flow than stock (5 per cent). The impact of BITs on FDI is significant even with the state of internal factors (such as capital account liberalisation, trade openness, high inflation rate and poor governance) in West African countries. The findings suggest that in the absence of BITs, West African countries would have suffered adversely from poor FDI inflows given their poor macroeconomic stability and governance. On the contrary, the PTIAs did not have significant impact on both FDI flows and stock. The results also show that FDI inflow to West Africa is both market and resources seeking.

Sensitivity analysis may not have been sufficient. For instance, not tested was the impact of the signalling effect of BIT, as well as other vertical FDI such as those from the USA.

The implication of the findings is that West Africa countries need to design policies and programmes that will enable them to maximise the technological spill‐over from FDI in order not to be perpetual suppliers of primary products and purchasers of manufactured goods. Further, they have to maintain macroeconomic stability and good governance. They need to understand the type of provisions in the BITs that constituent states signed and compare with the provisions of the PTIAs, with a view to discerning what is responsible for the superior response of FDI to BITs.

Given the absence of literature on the impact of BITs on FDI flows between West Africa and EU, it becomes imperative to investigate this issue with a view to motivating the investment component of the EPA, as investment is one of the Singapore issues that were removed from WTO's Doha Round.

This paper investigates whether democracy plays a mediating role in the relationship between foreign direct investment (FDI) and inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).

The empirical analysis is conducted using fixed effects and system GMM (Generalised Method of Moments) on a panel of 38 Sub-Saharan African countries covering the period of 1990–2018.

The results find that FDI has no direct effect on inequality whereas democracy reduces inequality directly in both the short run and the long run. The sensitivity analyses find that democracy improves equality regardless of the magnitude of FDI, resource endowment or democratic deepening whereas FDI only reduces inequality once a moderate level of democracy has been achieved.

The results discussed above thus have four policy implications. First, these results show that although democracy has inequality reducing benefits, SSA is unlikely to significantly reduce inequality unless the region purposefully diversifies its trade and FDI away from natural resources. Second, the region should continue to expand credit access to reduce inequality and attract FDI. Third, policymakers should undertake reforms that will reduce youth inequality. Lastly, the region should focus on long-run democratic reforms rather than on short-run democratization to improve governance and investor confidence.

Although there are existing studies that examine the association between FDI and inequality, FDI and democracy and democracy and inequality, this is the first study to explicitly examine the effect of democracy on the association between FDI and inequality in SSA, and the first study to separately consider the possible varied effects of contemporaneous democratization versus the long-run accumulation of democratic capital. In addition, rather than measure inequality by income alone, this study uses the more appropriate Human Development Index to account for SSA's sociological, education and income disparities.

The purpose of this paper is to examine if the knowledge spillover effect from foreign direct investment (FDI) inflow exists as well as its possible channels in China, and makes some policy suggestions.

Based on the literature review, the paper sets a panel data model to empirically examine if the knowledge spillover effect of FDI inflow exists in China, using data from 28 manufacturing industries during 2001‐2005.

The empirical results show that FDI played a positive role in China's knowledge creation and management in the sample period. At the same time, the demonstration effect and labor mobility effect served as the channels to yield beneficial results while the competition effect produced undesirable impact. However, the effect of these three channels on China's knowledge creation was very weak. Instead, the knowledge creation in China was still dependent on the input of R&D by domestic firms.

Owing to the data limitation, this paper only adopted data from large and medium enterprises to examine the spillover effect of FDI on the knowledge creation, and thus the conclusions may not be applicable to small enterprises.

Most of the present studies only examined the existence of knowledge spillover effect, without investigating econometrically its channels. Using the latest industry‐level panel data, this paper examines both the existence of knowledge spillover and its main spillover channels empirically.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the macroeconomic determinants of foreign direct investment (FDI) for the top five South Asian economies, namely, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Nepal, and to examine whether these factors are the same for each.

This study employs fully modified ordinary least squares and two-stage least squares estimation methods.

This study shows that South Asian economies have a number of FDI determinants in common. For example, market size and human capital are the two most common factors attracting FDI in each country (except for Nepal, which revealed a negative correlation between FDI and market size). Other factors, such as infrastructure, domestic investment, lending rates, exchange rates, inflation, financial stability/crisis, and stock turnover entered into regression with both positive and negative signs, thereby indicating that the underlying theories on FDI do not provide a clear prediction of the direction of the effect of a particular variable on FDI.

This paper studied the effects of demand-side factors on FDI. A comparative study of the supply-side factors may add further knowledge.

This paper provides evidence to show that the determinants of FDI are indeed country-specific. Thus, to design a suitable FDI policy, it would not be wise to solely rely on other economies’ FDI experiences.

This paper provides updated evidence on factors that are essential to promoting or deterring FDI in South Asian economies.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.

Using the 1995 Third Industrial Census data in China, I explore the impact of inward FDI on the productivity performance of domestic SOEs. Multilevel analyses of city- and firm-level data show that presence of FDI-related firms (sanzi qiye) in a city significantly improves the total factor productivity of SOEs that are located in the same city but not affiliated with FDI. I interpret the effects as not only technology spillovers but also as FDI-induced institutional innovations and reforms.

In spite of being the second largest recipient of foreign direct investment (FDI) in the world, China shows limited evidence of considerable FDI benefits on growth (Fan and Hu; Luo; Ran et al.). Motivated by Alfaro et al.'s model, the purpose of this study is to test whether poor financial market development might be responsible for the relatively low benefits of FDI on growth in China.

The author applies Blundell‐Bond system GMM estimators to a panel of Chinese provinces.

The results indicate that poor financial intermediation does indeed limit the transmission of FDI benefits within the Chinese economy. Moreover, the study reveals preliminary evidence that banks' credits to unproductive state‐owned enterprises (SOEs) constitute poor financial intermediation with negative growth implications. In contrast, credits to small private enterprises are associated with a positive impact of FDI on growth.

The study is constrained by data availability especially for private credit data across provinces.

Two policy implications can be drawn from the empirical findings. First, the direct policy implication is that to ensure positive benefits from FDI in China, domestic financial reforms are crucial. This is an important perspective for making FDI policies. The results also reveal some key priorities of financial reforms. More credits to small private enterprises are an indication of good financial intermediation, while more loans extended to unproductive SOEs signal poor financial intermediation. The priority of reform comes down to tackling the difficult problem of credit misallocation.

This paper provides an alternative perspective to address the weak FDI‐growth relationship found in China. Inspired by Alfaro et al.'s model and the understanding of the problem of Chinese financial markets, the study examines the role of the financial system in the FDI‐growth linkage and reveals how financial market conditions could influence FDI benefits in China.