The impact of foreign direct investment(FDI) on host country economic growth is a debatable issue in the recent economic literature. The purpose of this study is to examine this issue for a country which practiced comparatively more liberal economic policies within the South Asian region over four decades. The ARDL approach to cointegration is applied to identify long-run relationship and short-run dynamics between selected variables for the period of 1978 to 2015 for Sri Lanka. The empirical result confirms the long run relationship between the variables. FDI is positively correlated with economic growth in the short run and long run, but it is not a significant factor for economic growth in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka will have to undertake policy reforms related to FDI in order to attract more greenfield investments to boost economic growth creating new job opportunities and expanding exports in the manufacturing sector. These findings would be an example for other small open economies with similar economic characteristics.

The development of the industrial sector stimulates economic growth and development by reducing poverty and regional disparity, increasing export income, generating quality employment, as well as developing technological capabilities and productive capacities. It has been more than four decades since removing trade-related barriers, and tax incentives liberalized the Sri Lankan economy offered to foreign investors to attract FDI and promote the industrial sector. Hence, the objective of this study is to investigate the relationship between inward FDI and industrial sector performance of Sri Lanka at the aggregate level for the period 1980-2016. We use the Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model to identify the long-run relationship and short-run dynamics of the selected variables. ARDL bounds test verifies the existence of co-integration among the selected variables. The study fails to find a significant relationship between FDI and industrial sector growth of Sri Lanka in the long run as well as in the short run. The attraction of vertically integrated FDI that consists with advanced technology and value-added production is one of the solutions for overcoming the issue of low technology and knowledge of Sri Lankan industrial sector. Sri Lankan FDI strategy associated with industrial sector should consider the pull and push factors related to recipient and source country respectively. To promote the industrial sector via FDI, the government policy should focus on attracting more FDI that could be channeled into those sectors that would contribute to national competitiveness.

Foreign direct investment and foreign trade are vital factors in economic growth and development. The purpose of this study is to investigate the long run relationship and short-run dynamics between the two variables in Sri Lankan context. The study applies the ARDL cointegration and bound test for annual time series data covering the period from 1980 to 2016. The empirical test finds a significant positive relationship between FDI and foreign trade in the short run as well as in the long run. The bound test confirms the existence of co-integration relations among the variables. The error term of the ARDL ECM model is statistically significant with expected sign confirming convergence of short-run shocks into the long run equilibrium. All the diagnostic and stability tests confirm the validity of the selected model in policy formulating.

Export-led growth hypothesis assumed that long-term economic growth can be achieved through higher exports. Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is one of the determinants of export performance that can have a substitute effect or complementary relationship to export. The aim of this study is to investigate the impact of inward FDI on the export performance of Sri Lanka during the period from 1980 to 2016. Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model and bound test are applied to identify the long-run relationship and short-run dynamics of the selected variables. The short-run causality is checked by applying the Granger causality test. The ARDL bound test confirms long-run relationship among the variables. The study finds positive insignificant long run and short-run relationships between FDI and exports in Sri Lanka for the data period. Exports are highly sensitive to GDP and real effective exchange rate in the short-run and to domestic investment in the long-run. In order to promote exports via FDI, government policy should focus on attracting more FDI by drawing attention to national competitiveness. The study suggests a comprehensive sector level investigation on the impact of FDI on export performance of Sri Lanka.