Patterns of Foreign Direct Investment. An Investigation of FDI in Poland

Globalization emerged as a very important trend reshaping the economic landscape. One of the major drivers of this process is free capital flow between the geographical regions. In this new competitive environment it is crucial for both the companies and the policy makers to gain a good understanding of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) processes. In particular, what features of a region are important in attracting and retaining FDI and what are the temporal patterns in FDI development. The novelty of the approach lies in discovering the inter-industry and temporal dependencies in FDI and also in separate analysis of several industry segments. The results give new insights into the location choice patterns used by different types of companies. Also, to the best of my knowledge, it is the first empirical study of the time evolution of the FDI; especially in a sense of what kinds of prior investments influence later ones. The research is conducted at powiat level of territorial division in Poland.