Effect of Economic Complexity on Services Export Diversification: Do Foreign Direct Investment Inflows Matter?

This article has examined the effect of economic complexity on services export diversification. It has built on two arguments. The first one draws from Eichengreen and Gupta (2013b) and states that countries that export complex products would have a high penetration in the international goods market, and establish a network that could be exploited to expand their range of services export items. Second, by inducing higher inflows of foreign direct investment (FDI), greater economic complexity could contribute to fostering services export diversification. The empirical analysis supported these two arguments. The implications of the outcomes are discussed in the conclusion.

Effects of Age Dependency and Urbanization on Energy Demand in BRICS: Evidence From the Machine Learning Estimator

This paper examines the effects of age dependency ratio (the young age, old-age and overall age) and urbanization on renewable and non-renewable energy consumption in Brazil, India, China, and South Africa, considering the panel data from 1990 to 2019. We control economic growth and foreign direct investment inflows as key factors in the energy demand function using the Stochastic Impacts by Regression on Population, Affluence and Technology approach. Empirical analysis has been implemented using the Kernel Regularized Least Squares machine learning method to solve possible classification problems in the traditional regressions without relying on the linearity assumption. It is observed that the young age dependency, overall age dependency, and urbanization negatively affect both renewable and non-renewable energy demand. On the contrary, old-age dependency and economic growth are positively associated with renewable and non-renewable energy demand. The mixed effects of foreign direct investment inflows on renewable and non-renewable energy demand patterns are also found. Thus, the findings suggest that environment policymakers in the BRICS economies should prioritize urbanization, young age, and overall age population to improve energy efficiency.

Inward Foreign Direct Investment and Trade Openness in Vietnam: A Nonlinear Autoregressive Distributed Lag Approach

This study aims to examine the asymmetric relationship between trade openness and FDI (foreign direct investment) inflows to Vietnam by using NARDL (nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag) during the period from 1997 to 2019. Our findings show that the influence of FDI on trade openness is asymmetric in the short-run and long-run. But the influence of trade openness on FDI is symmetric in the short-run and asymmetric in the long run.