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KDI 경제교육·정보센터

ENG
  • 경제배움
  • Economic

    Information

    and Education

    Center

국제금융
FDI, gravity, and aggregation: revisiting the distance elasticity with sector-level FDI data
ECB
2026.07.28
This paper re-examines foreign direct investment motives in the ‘FDI gravity’ model (Kleinert and Toubal, 2010), focusing on the role of distance. More precisely, we investigate whether aggregate and pooled gravity models for FDI obscure relevant heterogeneities across sectors.
This is possible through the novel MREID dataset, which provides us with FDI data at the 2digit NAICS level for 184 countries over the period 2010 to 2020. Our results reveal that aggregate and pooled models mask significant sector heterogeneities in two aspects: (i) in the importance of horizontal versus vertical FDI motives, and (ii) in the distance elasticity. Distance is negatively correlated with FDI on an aggregate level, which is robust to multiple econometric specifications, but exhibits significant sector heterogeneity. Our analysis suggests the presence of complex sector-specific components that cannot easily be explained with standard economic rationales.