Assessment of Investment Attractiveness in Arab Countries (PDF)

Doctoral Thesis / Dissertation from the year 2016 in the subject Business economics - Investment and Finance, University of Szczecin (Faculty of Economics and Management), language: English, abstract: The flow of investments in developing countries varies greatly across countries. In this research, due to the lack of capital markets in some of the Arab countries we have been focusing on foreign direct investment as one of types of foreign investment. Foreign investment comprises foreign direct investment (FDI), which inflows have provided the strong impetus on economic development across countries. FDI serves as an important source of supply of funds for domestic investments, promoting capital formation in the host country. Nowadays, more attention is paid to the issues of foreign direct investments at both national and international levels. According to World Investments reports, many developing countries, including the Arab countries, have attracted only small amounts of FDI inflows despite their efforts towards the economic openness.

It means many factors impede the flow of foreign capital to Arab countries. The attractiveness of investment is a set of features and factors that allow the investor to evaluate the potential of any country to be more attractive for investment than the other one. Many factors include economic factors, social factors and political factors, which lead to increase in foreign direct investment. The potential investor considers these factors when choosing a country for investments and evaluating investment attractiveness. The term of investment attractiveness refers to a set of factors that help to provide a suitable investment climate. The term of the investment climate means economic and financial conditions in a country that affect whether individuals and businesses are willing to do an investment there.

This climate is usually available through improving the determinants of investment. The problem of policy makers in the Arab countries is to identify the factors that determine the investment attractiveness and to know the factors, which have the greatest influence on it. In this study, we are trying to find out the most important factors having influence on investment in Arab countries. Attracting investment is an important component of competitiveness for any country. It is worth mentioning here that competitiveness means the set of institutions, policies and factors that determine the level of productivity of the country.