inostrani kapital kao faktor razvoja zemalja - Ekonomski fakultet u ...

Prof. Alessio Lokar ∗
Prof. Lubica Bajzikova ∗∗
Dr. Michela Mason ∗∗∗
SOME CONSIDERATIONS OF FDI CONTRIBUTION
TO TRANSITION DEVELOPMENT:
A FOUR COUNTRIES COMPARISON CASE 1
Abstract: In general scholars consider Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), as an
important factor of development in transition economies, which are changing from former
socialist economic forms to more recent capitalist ones. A typical, and very much quoted
example, to that regard, is nowadays China. The opinion goes that FDI brings, to the input
economic environment, two badly needed elements: capital and know-how. From the
opposite point of view, also capital and knowledge are looking for such environments,
because they find there cheap production factors to be mobilized, in order to get higher
investment and equity yields. But is such a simple equation entirely true? Examples can be
found of countries, which were able to develop with less FDI, and predominantly by
domestic efforts, for instance, Japan. The paper tries to find answers to this question not
only theoretically, but, by taking into consideration examples from the field. Four transition
economies Slovakia, Slovenia, Poland and Russia have been taken into consideration and
studied, which permitted to draw some interesting answers to the question formulated
initially. The four countries are in some way also related from a cultural point of view,
being members of the Slavic, or Slavonic language group.
Key words: FDI TRANSITION FOUR COUNTRIES COMPARISON
I. Introduction
The importance of FDI in financing growth and investment in many countries
is well documented, but its role is not easy to distinguish from the role of other
factors involved, particularly the domestic ones, like governmental policies, local
entrepreneurship, abundance of local production factors and similar.
As a general statement, we can affirm that the existence of inward FDI
testifies in first place hope of foreign businessmen and their trust in the given local
country economy.
∗ alessio.lokar@uniud.it, University of Udine, Italy
∗∗ lubica.bajzikova@fm.uniba.sk, Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovak Republic
*** michela.mason@uniud.it, University of Udine, Italy
1 http://www.unctad.org/Templates/WebFlyer.asp?intItemID=2471&lang=1
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