FDI Inflows, Exports and Economic Growth in First and Second Generation ANIEs: Panel Data Causality Analyses

Using timeseries and panel data from 1981 to 2005, this paper examines the Granger causality relations between GDP, exports, and FDI among the three first generation Asian newly industrializing economies (ANIEs): Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and the four second generation Asian newly industrializing economies (ANIEs): Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand, in addition to China. We first show the difference between the first and second generation ANIEs in terms of real GDP per capita, trade structure, and inward FDI, and find some individual characters of each economy. After reviewing the current literature and testing the properties of individual timeseries data, we estimate the VAR of the three variables to find various Granger causal relations for each of the seven economies. We found each country has different causality relations and does not yield general rules. We then construct the panel data of the three variables for the first generation ANIEs, the second generation ANIEs, and finally, all seven economies as a group. We then use the fixed effects and random effects approaches to estimate the panel data VAR equations for Granger causality tests. The panel data causality results reveal that there are bidirectional causality relations among all three variables for the three first generation ANIEs, but only a weak bidirectional causality between real exports and GDP for the four second generation ANIEs. However, when all seven ANIEs are grouped for panel data analysis, we found FDI has unidirectional effects on GDP directly and also indirectly through exports, exports also causes GDP, and there also exists bidirectional causality between exports and GDP for the group. Our results indicate that the panel data causality analysis has superior results over the time series causality analysis. Economic and policy implications of our analyses are then explored in the conclusions.