Can Investment Incentives Cause Unemployment? An Empirical Analysis of The Relationship Between FDI and Employment Based on The OLI Framework

Abstract

Particularly in depressed regions, politicians often use unemployment as the main argument for investment incentives provided to MNCs. This paper applies Dunning’s OLI Framework to the relationship between FDI and employment, assuming that political negotiation between MNCs and the host government might have a zero or negative effect on employment. Since the last letter of OLI, internalisation, suggests that MNCs optimise all production factors available to them and “subsidies” provided to MNCs by governments decrease the relative price of capital, MNCs may use more labour-saving techniques. Two hypotheses are tested using the dynamic panel model (DPD) and Granger causality tests for 193 countries from 1985–2019, where the first is supported with no strong relationship between the variables. Implications for Central European audience: The paper results suggest the importance of a critical debate on the efficiency of investment incentives. This paper is among the first trying to disentangle the rather complex issue of FDI and employment on a theoretical and econometric level.