Foreign direct investment under globalization dilemma

My dissertation examines the question of how foreign direct investment (FDI) affects social welfare spending across countries. To date, there have been three important challenges to studies of the globalization-welfare state nexus. First, most scholars understand market internationalization in terms of the trade of goods and services while minimizing how other aspects of globalization fit into this discussion. Second, scholarly attention to economic globalization has been mistaken when understanding the relationship between demandand supply-side mechanisms for social welfare provision. Thus, the argument that trade stimulates demand for social welfare has been incorrectly used to oppose the argument that capital mobility significantly undercuts a government’s capability to fund welfare states. Lastly, existing studies on this topic mostly center around affluent democracies; various theories of welfare states require further elaborations to increase their external validity. My dissertation aims to overcome these challenges. For this purpose, I focus on one of the most important aspects of globalization, FDI, which bears meaningful implications for both demandand supply-side functions of social welfare provisions when explaining variations of social welfare spending across countries. I argue that since the late twentieth century, FDI has been a major cause of the “globalization dilemma,” proposed by Rodrik (1997), who argues that in an age of globalization