Abstract:In this paper, we revisit the relation between institutional factors and foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows in developing countries by employing a dynamic panel methodology, which enables us to deal with the persistency of FDI flows and endogeneity issues. We also contribute to the literature by using various measures of institutions to identify which aspects of institutional quality affect FDI in the developing world. Our empirical findings based on 113 developing countries over the period [2002][2003][2004][2005][2006][2007][2008][2009][2010][2011][2012] show evidence that some institutional factors matter more than others in attracting more FDI flows. We also found that the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009 had a negative impact on FDI flows.

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This paper attempts to re-examine the finance-trade nexus and tests whether higher levels of financial development can reduce trade openness. Using static and dynamic panel threshold regression techniques based on 64 countries over the period of 1970-2014, this study shows that financial development fosters trade openness until a certain level of threshold is achieved and beyond that threshold level, further increases in financial development lead to decline in trade openness. The results of this study suggest that there is a need for developing alternative and new trade financing channels to increase trade openness as well as it provides a strong empirical support for tradelimiting effects of financial development. Hence, this study is possibly encouraging for policy makers to redesign trade enhancing policies.

Over the last two decades, the current accounts in the European Union (EU) have diverged substantially. This divergence has raised concerns about the sustainability of the core countries' current account surpluses since the peripheral countries' financing of their significantly rising levels of current deficits depends on them. In this study, by applying both linear and nonlinear unit root tests and taking into account structural breaks in the datagenerating process, we examine the current account sustainability of the main core countries with large external surpluses. We find that the current accounts of Austria, Denmark and Germany are not on sustainable paths, which suggests that the core economies might not continue to run surpluses to finance the peripheral countries' external deficits. The results of this study imply that the policymakers in peripheral countries might take proactive measures against possible borrowing problems and capital outflow risk in the future.

The aim of this paper is to illustrate the long memory characteristics of the Turkish inflation rates and to analyze the potential inflation persistence. Our empirical analysis is carried out for inflation series of Turkey during the period of 1980-2013. We used the Autoregressive Fractionally Integrated Moving Average (ARFIMA) model and find that inflation in Turkey has long memory properties when structural breaks are not taken into account. When structural changes are considered, the long memory properties show different and ambiguous results. The exogenously identified structural changes have altered the dynamic structure of the inflation process and weakened the long memory characteristics of the series.