The decade of the 1990s was characterized by widespread liberalization of laws and regulations affecting inflows of foreign direct investment in developing countries. Using a data base supplied by UNCTAD, this article employs a crosssectional regression methodology to analyze the determinants of liberalization of foreign direct investment policies in 116 developing countries from 1992 to 2001. Ninety-five per cent of the changes in such policies over the decade (1,029 of 1,086) were liberalizing rather than restrictive. Two possible explanations of liberalization are suggested: policy makers’ beliefs that attracting more foreign direct investment is in the best interests of their countries, and external pressure to adopt neoliberal economic policies either from the dominant power (the United States) or international organizations such as the World Bank or International Monetary Fund. Results provide strong support for the “rational” decision (or “opportunity costs of closure”) argument and only limited support for the external pressure thesis. Country size, level of human resource capabilities and trade openness are found to be the primary determinants of the propensity to liberalize.
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 116 citations exist upstream.