The Country Risks and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI)

T he importance of foreign direct investment (FDI) in developing countries has begun to spread very rapidly, especially after the transition of command economies countries into open markets. Many countries see attracting FDI as an important element in their strategy for economic growth because FDI is widely regarded as an amalgamation of capital, technology, marketing, and management. So, it is important to understand why in many countries FDI inflow is lower than the expected. This paper is to investigate the linkages between political risk and foreign direct investment inflows. International country risk guide (ICRG) has dispersed separate financial, economic, and political ratings, and has identified 12 different political risks indices. Theoretically, it seems that there is a relationship between FDI and political risks, which is precisely the analysis undertaken in the current study. This paper employs an instrumental variable approach to investigate Iran time series data from 1985 to 2016. Wu-Hausman test is used to test for the presence of endogeneity, and two-stage least square estimator (2SLS) is estimated to find out the relationship between political risks indices and FDI inflows in Iran. The results show that external conflict, ethnic tensions, socioeconomic condition, investment profile, military, and religious tensions are the highly significant determinants of foreign investment inflows in Iran.