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Several research efforts were dedicated to analysing the effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows on gross domestic product (GDP) and employment in the host economies. The variations in the conclusions signal that other variables influence and moderate the effects of FDI on GDP and employment. Institutional elements receive limited research attention, despite their influence on the host economies. This paper investigates the moderating role of institutional elements in the FDI-host economies on FDI’s effects on GDP and employment with China and India as case studies. The approach utilises three principal methodologies. The first methodology presents an in-depth analysis of China and India, highlighting selected institutional elements with the potential to influence FDI’s effects. The second methodology confirms the presence of a positive correlation between FDI and GDP and a negative correlation between FDI and employment-to-population ratio (EPR) in both China and India. The FDI, GDP purchasing power parity per capita, and EPR datasets are extracted from the World Bank – DataBank World Development Indicators to ensure the consistency of the data. The results of the quantitative analysis validate the qualitative analysis. The qualitative analysis confirms the moderating role of the selected institutional elements with variations in direction and strength. Significant variations in FDI’s effects on GDP and employment are strongly related to variations in the institutions of governance. The institutions of governance include the functionality of the state organs, the efficiency of the legal system and enforcement of the rule of law, and the quality of implementation of FDI-supportive policies. The findings aim to increase the absorption of the positive effects of FDI on GDP and employment in the respective countries. The research is a cornerstone of in-depth future research into the following areas: the role of selective FDI and constructive conditional FDI policies, the functionality of judicial authority controls, and FDI favourable exchange rates and interest rates policies. The novelty and contribution of the paper lie in its comprehensive exploration of the moderating role of institutional elements on the effects of FDI on GDP and employment in host economies, with a specific focus on China and India. The paper contributes significantly to the academic literature on FDI and economic development by emphasising the importance of institutional factors and providing actionable insights for policymakers and researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a long history of debate about the changing Hindu Kush-Himalaya (HKH) environment, but with important disjunctures between research, international environmental agendas and institutions, and various different domestic policies at the national level. Within academe, a retreat from the Theory of Himalayan Environmental Degradation (THED) since the late 1980s has not been reflected to any degree in domestic policy agendas of India and China. Here, we make a comparative analysis of the “upstream downstream” debates (which claim that the resource use practices of upstream users have serious detrimental costs to those downstream) in two of the most powerful and populous countries of the HKH region: India and China. We find that the rejection of THED is, on the whole, contradicted but sometimes appropriated by different national players within important political arenas, and in this sense it becomes a discursive pawn in “games of the state.” Parts of the retreat from THED are simply ignored, and others are actively resisted. Set against these discursive maneuvers within domestic politics, the academic “state of the game” has undergone profound changes, shifting away from technically derived and science-led imperatives of environmental management toward issues of plural environmental truths, environmental justice, and hybrid knowledge. However, national debates have taken their individual routes, shaped largely by national political events. Thus, the poststructuralist turn in the social sciences in the academy and in some policy arenas, too—the deconstruction of one grand environmental narrative after another (e.g., deforestation, the wood fuel crisis, overstocking), the faltering claims of positivist science to deliver truth, and growing attacks of uncertainty—all this has had a contingent, but usually peripheral, impact upon national academic, political, and policy agendas in China and India. Some conclusions about policy studies are drawn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]