چکیده:
Economic integration among countries has continued to deepen over the past decade. This is especially visible at the regional level, with the escalation of Regional Integration Agreements (RIAs) ranging from Free Trade Areas (FTAs) to Customs Unions (CUs). Nowadays, many developing countries have entered a new regional integration agreement with developed and developing countries. Since international trade and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) are generally recognized as the two main channels of economic integration, the common question is whether international trade and FDI act as complements or substitutes. This paper tries to examine the interaction between trade integration and FDI in Iran, and provide an empirical assessment of the complementarity or substituting relationship between trade and FDI. We consider Iran bilateral trade as integration variable, with selected countries in EU, ASEAN+3, ECO and D8, by using 2SLS estimators within the period 1994–2014. Results indicate that the bilateral manufacturing export and foreign direct investment have a significant direct relationship with each other in Iran. Also, economic similarities with ECO and D8 have higher effect on both export and FDI.
خلاصه ماشینی:
The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the relationship between FDI and bilateral international trade of Iran with selected countries in EU, ASEAN+3, ECO and D8.
Pourshahabi, Salimi and Mahmoudiniya (2012) applied panel unit root, panel cointegration and panel causality test to distinguish the position of short-run and long-run causality among foreign direct investment (FDI) and trade in a panel of sixteen advanced European countries.
For considering integration effect, there used bilateral trade, openness and economic similarity variables between Iran and selected countries in EU, ASEAN, ECO and D8.
Wang and Swain (1995), tested the relative importance of independent variables including market size, cost of capital, labor costs, tariff barriers, exchange rates, import volumes and economic growth in OECD countries as well as political stability, within the framework of a one-equation model.
In the light of the above discussion, there specified the following equation for determining FDI inflow: FDIit = f (GDPit, Exchijt, IRit, INFit, DIit, EXijt, ECSIijt, Ut) (1) Where the subscript i is Iran, j (=1, …, n) stands for trade partner of Iran in selected blokes, t (= 1,…T) is the period of time (year), and Ut is the error components.
The results presented in tables showed that there was a positive significant relationship between trade flow and foreign direct investment in Iran, which indicates the presence of a complementary relationship between these two important variables in international trading.
The results summarized in Table 2 show that foreign direct investment in Iran promotes exports and has a positive effect on trade flows in this country.