Foreign Direct Investment and Trade: Complements or Substitutes? Empirical Evidence for the European Union
Bibliographic record
Abstract
International Trade and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) have grown at fast paces during the last decades. At this point, however, it is not clear whether trade and investment are regarded by firms as complementary ways of accessing other markets, or, instead, if they are employed as alternative strategies. This paper examines this issue empirically, for the particular case of Europe, an area in which commercial and economic integration has gained remarkable momentum since 1992. More specifically, it tests whether the reduction of trade barriers over time among the members of the European Union (EU) has increased not only trade flows but also FDI within those countries. A gravity model is estimated using the Hausman-Taylor estimation technique—to circumvent time invariability and endogeneity—for intra Europe FDI and, separately, for FDI to the EU members with origin in third countries. In addition to trade integration measures, this paper also analyzes the potential role of other traditional determinants of FDI, as the market size of the host country and the cost differential among home-host economies. The results suggest that EU commercial integration and FDI reinforce each other, thus being complements rather than substitutes in Europe. This effect is apparent for the intra-EU FDI and also for investment coming from countries outside the EU. Cost differentials are not as relevant as the possibility of gaining market share which leads us to conclude that in the EU the FDI pattern follows a horizontal strategy rather than a FDI vertical model.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".