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This paper investigates the relationship between political regimes and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) inflows to the developing countries for a sample of 134 countries over the 1983-2002 period. Using two categorical measures of regime type and three different measures of FDI, this study finds that, regardless of the measures of regime type, democracies are not significantly associated with either FDI in level or FDI as a ratio to GDP; democracy is positively related to a higher level of per capita FDI, but this result is not robust to alternative measures of political regime. Taken as a whole, there is no evidence of a systematic relationship between democracy and FDI inflows. This result suggests that being a democracy does not help attract higher levels of FDI.Autocracy, democracy, regime, foreign direct investment, developing countries,

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The link between business cycle volatility and the long-run growth rate has received increasing attention in the literature over the last ten years. Yet neither is there a theoretical consensus nor consistent empirical evidence that would lead us to believe the relationship is positive, negative or nonexistent either within broadly defined regions or over time. This study investigates a possible cause for this phenomenon. What we find is that out of 14 popularly defined sub regions, only 7 can be constrained over time within the respective sub region, while only two broadly-defined regional classifications are justified. We did find that the grouping of OECD countries is statistically valid, but only if the relationship is allowed to vary over time. We suggest a refinement of the current empirical work that takes into account both more narrowly defined regional and time parametric heterogeneity.