Foreign direct investment and economic growth in developing countries: The role of international trade and foreign debt

Abstract

The existing literature is sparse on the role of international finance in modeling the FDI-growth nexus. This study integrates the role of international trade and external debt in the FDI-economic growth nexus for Brazil, Nigeria, and Vietnam. We apply the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model to annual data covering the period 1990-2021. The results show that FDI and trade have positive but insignificant effects on economic growth in all three countries. In addition, our results show that external debt hampers long-term economic growth in these countries. Based on the results, we propose country-specific recommendations that take into account specific economic and financial conditions, global market dynamics, and the long-term development goals of developing countries.