Determinants of Bilateral Foreign Direct Investment Flows in the Oecd, with a Closer Look at the Former Communist

The main purpose of this paper is to study the determinants of bilateral foreign direct investment (hereafter FDI) flows in OECD countries. Special emphasis is placed on the new Central and Eastern European members (Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland) in order to assess whether they differ from those of the OECD on the whole. Our theoretical framework is based on the OLI paradigm (ownership, location, internalization) developed in Dunning (1974, 1980 and 1993). The panel data estimation takes into account the ideas suggested in Zhang and Markusen (1997). According to our findings the variables that can best explain the bilateral FDI flows within the OECD are: on the one hand, the technological superiority of the investor vis-à-vis the host and, on the other, the relative abundance of physical capital, the endowments of human capital, transport infrastructure, and the size of the host countries, which clearly act as a factor of attraction for FDI.