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This paper investigates the sectoral impacts of FDI on growth in Egypt between 1990 and 2007 based upon a unique data set. It highlights the aggregation bias inherent in many empirical studies that focus solely on the economy-wide effects of foreign investment. Aggregate inflows of FDI are shown to be detrimental to the country’s economic growth performance, possibly as a result of the ‘crowding-out’ of more productive domestic investment. Some positive sector-specific effects however, are found for investment in Manufacturing & Petroleum, which also has beneficial spillovers into other sectors. FDI in the Finance & Retail and Telecommunications & Information Technology sectors are found to generate significantly negative growth effects while those in Services and Tourism are negative but generally insignificant. These findings suggest that ‘market-seeking’ FDI in certain sectors has conspicuous ‘crowding-out’ effects, possibly owing to insufficient domestic absorptive capacity. The results of this study further demonstrate the importance of potential sectoral heterogeneity of own sector and inter-sectoral economic growth effects of FDI. It therefore highlights the critical need for policy makers to take a more disaggregated sectoral-level evaluation of the benefits of foreign investment, particularly in developing economies such as Egypt.

This paper analyses the cross-country impacts of the 2008 global financial crisis and the subsequent recovery process, with a specific focus on small economies. Key growth volatility variables highlight the critical exposure of small economies to the transmission of exogenous shocks owing to their high degrees of trade openness and inherent output and export specialisation, notably in financial services and tourism. These factors also constrain the mitigation of exogenous shocks giving rise to greater growth volatility. The paper demonstrates systematic asymmetries between countries with respect to the impact of the crisis and its persistence according to their size and patterns of sectoral specialisation. Small tourism-dependent economies and nonsovereign entities were particularly adversely affected although an offshore financial sector partly mitigated the impacts. The robustness of the findings is examined further in the appendix with regard to truncation problems arising from the use of international datasets.

This study investigates the role of human capital, political development in determining the magnitude of the effects of FDI on growth for a panel of 61 transition and developing countries for the period 1989 to 2013. A baseline growth model incorporating these variables is tested and then extended to include FDI interaction effects with human capital (measured using secondary school enrolment data) and political development (based upon EIU Democracy Index scores). These growth interaction effects between FDI and human capital vary according to regime type. Political development in conjunction with FDI appears to suppress the effects of FDI on growth in authoritarian countries while enhancing them in hybrid democracies. For more democratic countries, domestic investment is a more important driver of growth. The effects of FDI on growth in the ten Transition economies included in the sample dataset are found to be insignificant. Although this result might seem to differ from a priori expectations, it is in line with the findings of most earlier studies which cover the period up until 2004. The paper also provides no strong evidence that a critical threshold of human capital is required to generate beneficial spillover growth effects from inflows of FDI. The paper provides new and more detailed insights into the effects of FDI on growth with particular respect to human capital and political regime covering a large number of transition and developing countries based upon an up to date dataset covering a twenty-five year period to 2013.

The role of foreign direct investment (FDI) in small island developing states (SIDS) is an issue that has been neglected until relatively recently. The reasons for this lack of interest are unsurprising, given both the low absolute volume of capital flows

Research on the economic performance of small states has concentrated on the implications of small size and thin local markets. An interesting feature of many of the world's smallest states, of which the Pacific region has many, is that they face additional challenges than just small size. Many are remote from global markets for their products. In addition, a large number are also islands, many of which are also mountainous. Many of the smaller states are not just islands, but are also archipelagos. Hence in addition to small size, many of the world's small states also exhibit four other characteristics that may affect their economic performance: insularity, remoteness, being archipelagos and being highly mountainous entities. This paper examines the nature of the challenges posed by these four characteristics and seeks to produce empirical evidence of how difficult it has been to overcome these challenges. The paper draws on empirical evidence for 126 very small global states, dependent territories and highly autonomous regions. The paper then turns to the position of the Pacific small states and dependent territories.

This paper is concerned with the sustainable management of the Western Pacific tuna fishery given its critical contribution to the economies of many small island developing states in the region. The paper focuses on contrasting the operation, regulation and management of the tuna fisheries in two Pacific island states, Fiji and Samoa, in the light of progress in regional fishery co-operation, and is based upon research undertaken in 2003. The analysis identifies critical shortcomings in implementation and enforcement of sustainable management policies in Fiji, which compare unfavourably with Samoa's attempts to ensure the long-term sustainability of a crucial economic sector. The principal differences in the effectiveness of these policies can be ascribed to the quality of governance as well as the general coherence of national economic policies. The paper attempts to highlight some of the problems faced by small developing states in ensuring the long-term sustainability of an important migratory marine resource. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

This paper is concerned with the relationship between economic growth in small states and their vulnerability. A critical argument in much of the literature on small states, particularly small island states, is that their growth performance is greatly constrained by their vulnerability to exogenous shocks because of their size. These shocks include economic, political and environmental factors, which together dampen the long-run growth rate of these economies. The paper makes use of a global small state data set and appropriate quantitative techniques to test the relationship between growth and vulnerability using the results of Briguglio's Vulnerability Index. The results highlight some of the conceptual shortcomings in the analytical literature on small states, particularly islands, as well as suggesting that the Vulnerability Index is mis-specified. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.