Foreign Direct Investment and the Propensity for Repression

The Centre for the Study of Civil War at PRIO would like to invite you to participate in a workshop and discussion on foreign direct investments and human rights. David R. Davis, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Emory University, will be presenting his paper "Foreign Direct Investment and the Propensity for Repression". It is possible to register for the seminar now: sirir@prio.no

| Foreign Direct Investment and the Propensity for Repression
Centre for the Study of Civil War, PRIO

14 June 2006
Venue: PRIO, Hausmanns gate 7

We would like to invite you to participate in a workshop and discussion on foreign direct investments and human rights. David R. Davis, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Emory University, will be presenting his paper “Foreign Direct Investment and the Propensity for Repression” (coauthored with Lane T. Lamure, Department of Government, Harvard University). We have invited several scholars and others with specific interest in the topic, among others Henrik Syse, to participate in the discussion after the presentation.Scott Gates will chair the seminar, and Indra de Soysa (PRIO/NTNU) will serve as the discussant

AbstractDespite a large and growing body of research, the link between domestic human rights conditions and foreign direct investment (FDI) remains poorly understood. In the absence of rigorous and explicit theorizing, existing research relies on widely divergent measures of foreign economic influence and produces inconsistent empirical results. We attempt to address some of the short comings in the literature by presenting and testing the argument that if FDI influences the propensity for regimes repress, its influence should vary by sector. In extractive sectors, in which the relative contribution of labor to the production process is limited, we expect that FDI might encourage regimes to repress. However, flows of FDI into sectors of the economy in which the contribution of labor is high, such as high tech manufacturing or the service sector, we expect that FDI will not encourage regime repression. We evaluate this argument in two sets of empirical tests. First, we examine the influence of FDI flows and stocks on human rights performance globally from 1981 to 2000, using proxy measures for sectoral effects of FDI. In the second set of analyses, we examine FDI inflows by sector for all available countries in 2001. Our results provide general support for our argument, although there are some anomalous findings.

The workshop will start with the presentation of the paper at 10.00 and last until 12.00. It will be held at PRIO in Hausmanns gt. 7. If you would like to attend please send an e-mail to: sirir@prio.no | | --- | | |