Friends or foe? The complementarity or substitutability of financial development and FDI, financial development, and trade openness on domestic investment

This paper examines the relationship between financial development and FDI and between financial development and trade openness in boosting domestic investment. Initially, this paper examined this issue for panel data sample of 161 countries over 1995-2018. Considering the issue of aggregation bias due to heterogeneous nature of countries in the sample, this complementarity or substitutability effect between financial development and FDI as well as financial development and trade openness have further been re-examined by using 129 developing country samples. Using panel fixed effects (FE) and two-step system GMM estimation technique, the empirical results demonstrate the substitutability between financial development and FDI as well as a substitutability relationship between financial development and trade openness in driving domestic investment. The results hold for both the samples and also in alternative measures of financial development and extended specifications.