This research challenges the contemporary view of economic policy makers in transition European economies that the EU integration process will lead to a greater inflow of Foreign Direct Investments (FDI), thereby increasing living standards. With the Brexit referendum, the integration of the EU has been threatened by a distressing existential question: is EU membership valuable for transition countries if even developed countries (like the UK) vote to leave or decided not to align like Switzerland and Norway in the past? Our analysis considers the success of several countries in Eastern Europe in attracting and benefiting from FDI on their way to EU membership. Analyzing a 13-year panel data of 16 transition countries, we found no statistically significant positive association between FDI inflow and EU accession. We argue, that it is also important to consider the welfare for domestic economies that can emerge from those investments. We illustrate this through the case study of a successful combination of institutional development and local content policies implementation accompanied by sufficient FDI inflows in a non-EU country -Kazakhstan.

Many studies have reported that foreign-owned companies pay higher wages on average than domestic companies. However, this can be attributed to the different composition of the workforce or to a wage premium at the individual worker level. This paper contributes to this literature by observing whether individuals that change their job from a domestic to a foreign- owned company experience a change in their wages. Furthermore, it investigates whether this difference in wage patterns is moderated by workers? education. This paper is one of the very few micro-econometric studies that deal with this question in a transition country, Serbia, using employer- employee data on the private sector over a long time period (15 years). Changing jobs is found to be positively associated with workers? wages: the change in wages is higher when moving from a domestic to a foreign company than vice versa. The evidence suggests that more-educated workers benefit the most from leaving domestic companies.

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This study analyses the effects of government subsidies for foreign direct investment (FDI) on employment at the municipal level in Serbia. It finds that the positive correlation of subsidies with employment is limited to the creation of subsidized jobs. In other words, subsidies are ineffective in creating additional jobs, beyond the jobs created by subsidized multinational enterprises (MNEs). There is no crowdingin and there is some evidence of crowding-out in the least developed municipalities. The municipalities that received subsidized investments did not experience higher employment in comparison with the period of no subsidies and in comparison with municipalities that never received subsidized investments. Some positive effects emerge, with a two-year lag, in the municipalities which, conditional on the level of development, lowered wages. The key policy implication is that subsidy-driven FDI policy, based on financial subsidies per job created, does not lead to a sustained employment growth pattern. Policymakers might need to target high value-adding activities of MNEs that induce the creation of domestic value added.